Children are known to invent stories as they play, often sparking deep engagement with objects in their environment. The TALES (Tinkering and Learning Engineering Stories) Project, a collaboration of Chicago Children's Museum, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University and Roosevelt University, employed design-based research methods to develop and study a variety of approaches to story-based tinkering during both home-based and exhibit-based programs for children ages 5 to 8 and their families. Outcomes of this research-in-the-service of-practice project include strategies to support children's original storytelling during tinkering, insights into design-based research methods, and promising findings about story-based tinkering on young children's engineering learning and spatial reasoning.

Stories do not have to come from books, or experts; with appropriate support, young children and their families can tell their own tales that will facilitate STEM learning during tinkering. Moreover, the ways in which the structure of a story and the engineering process are alike can provide important supports for families to create their own stories about testing problem solutions, learning what does and doesn't work, redesigning and trying again. Our project aimed to leverage the ubiquity of stories in the lives of children by developing museum practices to engage children and their caregivers in telling stories that can scaffold STEM learning during engineering-rich tinkering.

Due to the pandemic, early programming and research took place via Zoom connections in children's homes. Following a videotaped introduction, a child and one parent were observed while engaging in a story-based tinkering project using objects, toys, and materials already at hand. The three programs piloted and studied during that year became the basis for our initial work once Chicago Children's Museum reopened, since in both settings the goal was to spark children's story telling in ways that supported their engagement in an empirically-based engineering process (including testing and revision) during tinkering. What changed were our methods of introducing and supporting story-based tinkering in a well-equipped workshop setting serving a large number of diverse families.

Over the course of the project, we successfully developed programs in which children and caregivers collaboratively told unique fanciful and real-life stories to accompany and explain their problem solving. Across iterations of programming (and across home and museum settings), we varied the challenges and story elements, but each program centered on an engineering-rich tinkering task that involved designing something that could do something (i.e. move, fly, fit, etc), along with opportunities for iterative testing. Most programs suggested at least one central character--often a toy, sometimes the child--while the reason behind the challenge (aka the story) was up to the child to invent along with other details about the setting and plot.  For example, in the "Here to There" program, children could choose which of several items they wanted to relocate and an "important reason" to move the item(s) from the surface of a table (here) to the floor (there). Other challenges involved developing an aircraft for a toy monster pilot (who is delivering what to whom), developing a playground ride that would work for three physically different toys, designing a hat that will stay on the child during a set of activities, and safely moving a toy driver through a perilous landscape of light and shadows (with both the nature of the environment and the perils left to the imagination of the child). These and other design-based programs were tested and refined through multiple iterations as we sought the right combination of facilitation, materials, testing opportunities, and open-endedness to enable children and their families to tell their own stories while engaging in the cyclical engineering process of making, testing and revising.  Enhancements have included showcasing stories by previous visiting families; offering a story wheel that combines characters, settings and situations; and providing a set of just-in-time caregivers tips.

The Design Based Research tracked success and impact of each program. Tinkering Lab is equipped with multiple cameras allowing families who consent to be recorded and interviewed, and we were able to collect further evidence from a nearby exhibit, Story Hub, that invites families to reflect on their museum experiences. A close working relationship between practitioners and researchers provided quickly coded data to inform iterations in program design. Generally, the more families talked about their stories while tinkering, the more they also talked about engineering and used spatial language. This work has implications for how to encourage engineering-rich tinkering through storytelling, leveraging everyday practices of many families to support children’s learning.  

Through our collaboration, the TALES project has been able to advance knowledge and the evidence base for practices that engender story-based tinkering.

Last Modified: 12/20/2023
Modified by: Tsivia Cohen