Promoting children’s engagement in engineering design practices in a children’s museum

• In Event: Children’s exploration in informal learning environments

Abstract

Introduction. There is tremendous national interest in increasing, supporting, and integrating tinkering programs in informal settings. This interest is, in part, due to the fact that tinkering experiences can provide young children with opportunities to engage in science and engineering practices (Brahms & Werner, 2013; Petrich et al., 2013). However, we have a limited understanding of when and how tinkering experiences can provide young children with meaningful learning opportunities. Therefore, our goal was to identify conditions that can promote children’s engagement in engineering design practices, such as designing, testing, and redesigning, during tinkering. In particular, we investigated whether providing families with brief orientations prior to entering a tinkering exhibit fostered their engagement in such practices.
Methods. The study took place in the Tinkering Lab exhibit at a children’s museum. A total of 216 5- to 9-year-old children and their parents were observed working to “make something that rolls”. The exhibit is a large workshop equipped with a variety of materials that could be used as wheels and axles (e.g., bottle caps, skewers) and tools (e.g., drills, tape). We took a design-based approach to our study, so there were three iterations of the Make it Roll program. For the first iteration (MIR1), we presented families with the engineering design challenge of making something that rolls, but no instructions for how to address the challenge were provided. For the second (MIR2) and third (MIR3) iterations, families received brief orientations from museum facilitators. Specifically, the facilitators provided tips for how to make something roll, showed families models that rolled and did not roll, and modeled testing for the families. Families who were observed during MIR3 were further invited to make comparisons between the models that rolled and did not roll. To examine the impact of these orientations on children’s engagement in engineering practices, we recorded the number of tests performed and what happened after each test (e.g., children continued to work on the creation, decorated it, tested it again).
Results. We found a significant main effect of iteration, indicating that children who participated in the MIR2 (M = 7.15, SD = 5.57) and MIR3 (M = 8.70, SD = 7.10) iterations conducted more tests than those who participated in the MIR1 iteration (M = 4.49, SD = 4.48), F(1, 208) = 8.29, p = .000. Additionally, after controlling for the number of tests performed, children in the MIR2 (M = 4.54, SD = 4.50) and MIR3 (M = 4.84, SD = 4.13) iterations were more likely to continue to work on their creation after testing it than those in the MIR1 iteration (M = 2.29, SD = 2.70), F(2, 200) = 5.26, p = .006.
Discussion. The results revealed that providing families with facilitated orientations can promote children’s engagement in testing and redesigning. We did not find differences between those who were observed during the last two iterations, which suggests that even brief, actionable information might be sufficient. Implications of this work for the design of informal educational experiences will be discussed.

Authors

• Maria Marcus, Roosevelt University
  Presenting Author

• Catherine A. Haden, Loyola University Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pirko Tõugu, University of Tartu, Estonia
  Non-Presenting Author

• David H. Uttal, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author