Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
Research assistance for data collection in this paper was provided by Sue March (field leader), Fatema Taj Johora, and Junqian Ma and data organisation by Freya Fleer-Stout and Ainslie Holland. Special acknowledgement is made of the two teachers who participated in the study, Rebecca and Oriana. Special thanks are given to the anonymous reviewers who supported the development of this paper.
Funding
Australian Research Council Discovery (ARC) Grant DP140101131 funded the study. Funds from the ARC FL180100161 also supported the refinement of the paper.
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Fleer, M. Engineering PlayWorld—a Model of Practice to Support Children to Collectively Design, Imagine and Think Using Engineering Concepts. Res Sci Educ 52, 583–598 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09970-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09970-6