Promoting Engineering To K12 Students Through Spatially Challenging Making And Outreach Activities

Outreach activities are an important and valuable approach to promoting engineering education and careers to young people. They provide an excellent way to show that engineering can be fun, challenging and rewarding. With some careful thinking, they can also be used to promote and develop spatial ability, a cognitive ability that is very important to engineering. The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate examples of outreach activities that are the result of such careful thinking. Those who attend this workshop will be able to: Explain why and how spatial ability is so important to success in engineering education Summarise findings from research on gender and SES differences in spatial ability List some key features of hands-on outreach activities that require spatial thinking Find and explain a lesson plan or set of instructions to run a spatial outreach activity Suggest ideas for how they could adopt spatial thinking into their outreach activitie

CREATE Research Symposium 2022 Book of Abstracts

This is the book of Abstracts for a recent symposium held by the CREATE research Group in TU Dublin

Playful learning through designing toys: Developing a design education toolkit for a non-profit organisation in rural Kenya

Sustainable Rural Initiatives (SRI) is a non-profit organisation in Okana, a rural community in West Kenya. SRI provides the community members of Okana with opportunities to develop practical skills such as carpentry and tailoring. SRI also works with international partners with specific expertise to give local community members opportunities to develop skills they would otherwise not have had. In all these efforts, there is a strong focus on reflecting the culture, surroundings, and values of the community. Play is an important aspect of how children develop and make sense of their surroundings. Toys are tools through which play is facilitated, but making toys itself is a common form of play too. The literature on play suggests that by providing kids with joyful, engaging, iterative and socially interactive play experiences, adults can guide children’s play to help children develop skills directly involved with that play experience, but also more general learning-to-learn skills. My project had two goals; the first was to give children the opportunity to develop design skills in a fun and playful way. Design is an exciting medium for kids to develop several valuable design skills, that are broadly applicable. The second was to give SRI the tools and practical knowledge to provide children with design activities through which they can develop those skills, both now and in the future. To reach these goals I designed a toolkit, consisting of a manual and several videos, that allows SRI to organise playful design workshops for kids to help the children develop these design skills. In the workshops, the children design toys from materials such as clay and wood, that are available around SRI’s community centre. In the workshops the design process is structured in three phases. In the first phase, a topic is introduced through a video, that then poses several questions to help the kids discuss that topic. These discussions help them to make their goal concrete, as they practise working together. In the second phase they build and test their idea. The kids first gather materials, and then use those materials to prototype their toy. They practise making their ideas tangible and learn from making mistakes. Finally they present their designs to each other, allowing the others to ask questions and give feedback. In doing so, they practise their communication skills and their capacity to reflect. From the third workshop onward, the facilitator has to introduce the topic and questions to the children himself, replacing the video. The facilitator can find suggestions for topics and stories in the manual to help him come up with other challenges for the kids. This toolkit gives children in Okana a fun pastime through which they are introduced to the design process, and can develop valuable design skills. This toolkit has given SRI the knowledge and tools to host those workshops. It has also given SRI a model they can use to effectively transfer knowledge from external partners to the local community.Design for Interactio

Developing spatial literacy through designing origami: advancing maker education pedagogy with maker études: advancing maker education pedagogy with maker études

Spatial literacy is crucial to success in STEAM-disciplines. Within these disciplines, spatial thinking manifests in a variety of ways, ranging from visualising how pieces of a solution might fit together to effectively communicating solutions to others through language, gestures, and graphic representations. Pedagogy for developing spatial literacy for children is still in its infancy, as training studies tend to focus on paper-and-pencil-based activities that resemble psychometric tests without explicit consideration for didactic approaches. Maker education offers children a design-based way of learning through a process of tinkering, designing, and building, with potential for creative output. In practice, educational maker activities generally tend to overemphasise prototyping tools and the development of the procedural knowledge required to use those tools. However, these hands-on learning activities could aid children to not only develop making skills, but also to attain spatial literacy. Although studies exist that identify spatial thinking during educational maker activities, no efforts have yet been made to design a maker activity that specifically aims to develop participants’ spatial thinking holistically. This paper details a case study of the design and implementation of an origami workshop that aims to develop participants’ spatial literacy. Origami, the art of folding sheets of paper into figures, is a process that requires frequent and varied use of spatial thinking. The workshop adopts the form of a ‘maker étude’, analogous to a musical étude, a satisfying exercise to practice and improve a particular technique so it can be applied creatively. The implementation of the origami maker étude in a public library makerspace in Amsterdam and its potential to support the development of spatial literacy are discussed. Finally, several suggestions are made for future research into the development of primary-school age children’s spatial literacy in makerspace