Preschool environments offer an abundance of opportunities for exploring the physical world where children can learn engineering concepts and principles (theories or laws). Yet how teachers design motivating conditions for engineering thinking has not been fully investigated. The study reported in this paper examined how teachers and young children engaged in engineering principles over 12 months. Digital video observations (123 h) captured the daily interactions of two teachers and 13 children across two classrooms during their engineering sessions. The participants were 8 preschool children aged 4.7–5.5 years and 5 school children aged 5.5–6.4 years. Different to previous studies that focus on engineering affordances during free play, the results identify new play pedagogies that support personally meaningful engineering learning of children in preschools. The new practices, named as an Engineering PlayWorld, build imaginary situations, where children in teams act ‘as if’ they are engineers, meeting engineering problems and generating engineering solutions.

学前环境为探索物理世界提供了丰富的机会，孩子们可以在其中学习工程概念和原理（理论或法律）。然而，教师如何为工程思维设计激励条件尚未得到充分研究。本文报告的这项研究考察了教师和幼儿在 12 个月内如何参与工程原理。数字视频观察（123 小时）记录了两名教师和 13 名儿童在工程课程期间跨两个教室的日常互动。参与者为 8 名 4.7-5.5 岁的学龄前儿童和 5 名 5.5-6.4 岁的学龄儿童。与以往专注于自由游戏期间的工程可供性的研究不同，结果确定了新的游戏教学法，支持学前儿童的个人有意义的工程学习。新的实践，命名为工程 PlayWorld, 构建想象的情况，团队中的孩子表现得“好像”他们是工程师，遇到工程问题并生成工程解决方案。