Capturing the Design Thinking of Young Children Interacting with a Parent

Children have often been labeled as “natural engineers” whose curiosity about the world around them evokes comparisons to skills used by professional engineers and taught to undergraduate engineering students. Building towers out of blocks, taking things apart and figuring how things work are a part of childhood and have been considered to be precursors to engineering thinking.However there has been considerable debate around what engineering looks like for young children. Can young children engage in design and if so, what does that look like? How can we differentiate “design” (especially “modeling” or “create”) activity from normal everyday play?Several design models have taken into account the developmental stages of young children, but they often are based on assumptions and have minimal evidence.In the GRADIENT (Gender Research on Adult-child Discussions within Informal ENgineering environmenTs) study, a collaboration between researchers at a museum and university, we looked at how parents with young girls engage in two different engineering activities in informal settings. The first setting is a Preschool Play dates program for children 3-5 years old, where the parent-daughter dyads were asked to build a tower first out of familiar materials (foam blocks)and then out of unfamiliar materials (dado squares). The second setting is a pneumatic ball run that is part of an engineering exhibit at the museum and was focused on children 6-11 years old.In each setting, 30 dyads were video recorded, and the verbal and non-verbal segments were open and axially coded for engineering talk and action.We found that children engage in the engineering design process in ways that are similar to other models of the engineering design, that include problem scoping, idea generation, modeling,testing, evaluation and revision. We also found that children engage in both predictive and reflective behavior, and often add context to the problem. However, we want to acknowledge that the way children engage in engineering thinking is different from the way that adults do(especially with idea generation and revision) and we will discuss this further in the paper. This work lays a foundation for future research, as understanding how children engage in the design process can help us understand how children learn engineering design skills, and how people develop engineering design skills across pre-college, undergraduate, and professional practice.The work also has implications for the development of learning experiences in both school and out-of-school settings

Engineering Together: Context in Dyadic Talk During an Engineering Task (K-12 Fundamental)

Exploring how children develop early interest and understanding in engineering canprovide useful information for the ongoing efforts to increase the access of women inengineering careers. Drawing on occupational choice theories, girls and women havetended to place a high value on helping others in their work, but do not often realize thatcareers in engineering can lead to these types of endeavors. Adding layers of socialcontext that highlight the connections between engineering endeavors and improving thelives of others may create a more engaging experience for girls and women, andpotentially lead to increased development of girls’ engineering interest and understanding.Additionally, informal learning environments are positioned to become a pivotal role in inspiring today’s youth to pursue careers in STEM. These contexts have already been shown to be important avenues in which children can develop lifelong interest and understanding of broad range of STEM topics. Moreover, informal learning environments often allow for parents and children to work together to foster interest and engagement within STEM.Parent-child dyads who were visiting a metropolitan science museum as part of it\u27s program for preschool-aged children were asked to participate in a study that explores parent-child engineering conversations through a conversation analysis methodology. Dyads consisting of a parent with their daughter (aged 3-5 years) were video-recorded while engaged in two different engineering tasks: building a tower out of familiar materials and constructing a second tower out of unfamiliar materials. In the preliminary phase, participants (n = 25) were asked to build a tower with a specified goal, whereas participants in the follow-up phase (n = 25) were given the same directions though infused with a social context (i.e. building for someone, for a specified purpose).This paper will examine the differences in the use of context between fathers and mothers within the preliminary and follow-up phases, including the frequency and type of context used towards the design of the towers. Four case studies were evaluated to highlight key findings such as the addition of context to the preliminary phase and the involvement of social context in the follow-up. It was found that in the preliminary phase that both parents and the children added context to the task – a finding that resonates with the research that girls are more interested in socially relevant activities. When given a more detailed background, children integrated the given context within design decisions and explanations even going so far as to expand on the original information.By examining the dyad’s interaction, we hope to identify recommendations we can make to other parents on how to foster engineering interest in their children, as well as contribute ideas for activities for K-5 classrooms to reach a wider range of children

Using Puppets to Elicit Talk During Interviews on Engineering with Young Children

Interviewing can be tricky at best, but with a younger audience (\u3c 5 years) there are some additional barriers that inhibit the interview process such as shyness, short attention span,lack of vocabulary, and level of parental guidance (Clark, 1999). When in an interview, a child may try to ‘second guess’ what the researcher wants them to say, especially if they believe that the interviewer may already know the answer (Gallop, 2000). Additionally young children tend to give monosyllabic answers to open ended questions (Tizard &Hughes, 1984), and might require more prompting than adults.One aide that has been recently investigated is the use of puppets to elicit children’s talk for research (Epstein et al., 2008). Puppets have been shown to: • Decrease children’s fears of the interview process • Lower anxiety levels • Help assess children’s knowledge • Help children to adjust to environment • Provide effective communication and teaching tools. Most research focuses on puppets within clinical contexts, but recently the use has been extended towards other applications such as qualitative interviews (Epstein et al., 2008),mathematical lessons (Cauley, 1988), promoting science engagement (Naylor et al,2007), and teaching phonics (Johnston & Watson, ???). However, there has not been any documented use of this research approach within engineering education.There are three common interview techniques involving puppets in practice: the Alien Puppet Interview (API) (Krott and Nicoladis, 2005), the Puppet Interview (PI) (Cassidy,1988; Verschueren, Buyuk and Marcoen, 2001) and the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI) (Measelle et al., 1998; Ablow et al., 1999). Each technique has a different strategy depending on how the child interacts with the puppet.As part of a larger project, children ages 3-5 were interviewed about an engineering task that they had just completed with their parents during a museum event. The interview was a hybrid mix of the Alien Puppet Interview and the Puppet Interview, depending on the way in which the child interviewee chose to interact with the puppet. Thirty interviews were analyzed for children’s interaction, quality of answers, and behavior toward the puppet.In the paper, we will provide more details about the specific interview approach used for our study (as well as insights into how children responded to this interview approach) in addition to a larger discussion of the three interview techniques in order to provide a research methodology resource for other pre-college engineering education researchers to use

Exploring Complex Engineering Learning Over Time with Epistemic Network Analysis

Recently, K-12 engineering education has received increased attention as a pathway to building stronger foundations in math andscience and introducing young people to the profession. However, the National Academy of Engineering found that many K-12engineering programs focus heavily on engineering design and science and math learning while minimizing the development ofengineering habits of mind. This narrowly-focused engineering activity can leave young people – and in particular, girls – with a limitedview of the profession. This study describes Digital Zoo, an engineering learning environment that engaged girls in authentic engineeringactivity in order to link the development of engineering skills and knowledge to engineering ways of thinking. Specific activities from anengineering practicum were recreated in the learning environment, where ten middle school girls from diverse backgrounds role-played asengineers designing solutions to a client-based project. Responses on pre, post, and follow up interviews suggest the participants wereable to develop each of the five epistemic frame elements – engineering skills, knowledge, identity, values, and epistemology – as a resultof Digital Zoo. In situ data from the intervention was analyzed with a sophisticated mixed methods approach that integrated qualitativemethods with a new quantification technique, Epistemic Network Analysis. These techniques allowed for the exploration of complexthinking and learning throughout the different activities of Digital Zoo. The results of this analysis identified client-focused activity andnotebook-based reflection as two activities within Digital Zoo that fostered key linkages to engineering values and epistemology