Hi Stephen! We currently have four projects in which we are varying story and engineering. We have followed up with most families after two weeks. One thing we have seen in a few families is their continued use of the project they make (we are exploring that in the follow-ups). At the moment, we have looked at what families are saying directly after the project. Lauren (one of our graduate students) can share some of those early trends.

Hello Stephen! As Graciela mentioned, we are following up with families two weeks after their tinkering sessions. The follow-up (for Here to There ramp participants) includes a transfer of knowledge task that asks children questions about slopes, speed, and distance. We are still analyzing this data and are looking forward to seeing what children remember over time and whether they generalize their knowledge to other contexts!

We have already been able to examine what some families talked about during and immediately after tinkering. Preliminary findings suggest that families who identify problems, test, and redesign their projects during tinkering talk more about engineering afterwards! In regard to storytelling, we have seen that families who create higher quality narratives (i.e., talk more about agents, settings, events, and themes) after tinkering also talk more about engineering.

Moving forward, we plan to explore how the different kinds of storytelling prompts and tinkering activities depicted in our video may foster narrative construction and engineering learning!

Thanks Lauren. This work seems like a really good opportunity to surface and build dialog about misconceptions too. I know parents and teachers struggle with that all the time. And how to guide discourse around misconceptions to help them reason about them and be open to changing their thinking. Wondering if you have thought about this in your work.

Hi Stephen. Thanks for this great question.  One of the shifts in our Tinkering Lab (where this collaborative research was located before the pandemic) has been to refine our programmatic challenges from "make something" to "make something that does something"  By adding testing stations (ramps, fans, wind tunnels) to the environment, we provide an opportunity for children to try what they have made and often to iterate based on what happened.  The focus on functionality also offers opportunities for visitors to question their assumptions based on evidence.  In an earlier study we have looked at the impact of our facilitators modeling these questioning strategies during orientations as families enter the exhibit.  Our approach to home-based programming builds on the success of these museum-based strategies while tying the evidence supplied by testing solutions to a problem in the context of a story.

Hi Billy, Thanks so much for your kind comment! The videos families watch vary in both the amount of story information and engineering information families are given. We are currently exploring that intersection across projects. For example, in the Here to There project (video clips that include ramps) we invite families to design a 6 foot ramp to get something important of their choice from one place to another. The stories revolve around the questions, “What is that important thing that needs to get from here to there? And why?”, as well as how to engineer the ramp to advance the story and the tinkering activity. 

Thanks Graciela. I think the framing question and context can be so important. It reminds me of the work that the Exploratorium did some years ago on "juicy questions" that prompt deeper engagement with interactive science exhibits. (See https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/how-exploratorium/juicy-questions)

Thanks Kemi! This pivot has been a true collaboration between researchers and our museum partners. We see the potential to demonstrate how the same activity can work in the home and in the museum (something we will study systematically), but it's also interesting to think how these may work in other settings. 

Hi Michael, thanks so much for the excitement! We are in the analyses process at the moment, but we can let you know about publications as they become available. I think that Diana can speak specifically to your question about cultural-responsive characteristics and perhaps share some early observations.

Hi Michael, thank you for your interest in our project! In order to be inclusive and accessible to all families, the story prompts are open-ended enough that families really get to use their own creativity to build their story. We have even seen that families will use their prior knowledge and experiences when creating their stories and tinkering projects!

In addition, some of the videos that families watch that introduce the activity are available in Spanish and English. These families also meet with a bilingual researcher. This has allowed us to reach more diverse families, and the families also have the liberty to create their stories in whichever language they feel most comfortable with.

Hi Monkia! Thanks so much for your comment! I just watched your video as well. Lauren summarized a few preliminary findings above and we have a few recent publications you may want to check out:

Pagano, L. C., Haden, C. A., and Uttal, D. H. (2020). Museum program design supports parent–child engineering talk during tinkering and reminiscing. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 200:104944. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104944

Acosta, D. I. Polinsky, N.J. Haden, C. A., and Uttal, D. H. (2021) Whether and How Knowledge Moderates Linkages between Parent–Child Conversations and Children’s Reflections about Tinkering in a Children’s Museum, Journal of Cognition and Development, 22:2, 226-245, DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2020.1871350

Thanks so much for sharing those publications. I am looking forward to reading them.

Thank you, Liandra! I love working with children- you get some great, concrete responses to the activities- from exclamations ("Yay!"), when a test is a success, to groans and buoying themselves up when a test does not go as planned. Both responses show how invested they are in their tinkering work! 

Definitely! And I think our projects have some connections to each other - adapting to the circumstances and creating a meaningful experience for students and families. Keep up the great work!!!

Thanks so much for this comment Julie! A lot of effort has been put in by our museum partners and the research team to think about activities and prompts that are culturally relevant and fun! 

Hi Caitlin, thank you so much for your interest in our project! That is a great question about how families learned about the activities. Many of these families had participated in research we had conducted through our university-museum partnership prior to the COVID-19 pandemic so we contacted them about the activity, other families learned about the activity from social media postings, and some learned about the activity through community organizations with whom we shared the opportunity. We are of course open to other ideas on how to spread the word about this opportunity more widely! 

I am excited to watch your video and see the incredible your team is doing! 

Hi Erica! Thanks for sharing the study! That's a great question. We are hoping that by making the conflict more meaningful, the story will in fact increase specific scientific strategies. One very preliminary finding that we are seeing, is that families use more scientific practices when they are given time prior to engineering to really plan and discuss their story! But again, this is only preliminary.

Thanks for the paper Erica! It's very interesting to consider how these tasks relate to that work by perhaps exploring how older children and their parents engage in testing. 

Thank you, Toby! It's great to hear your perspective as a K-12 teacher. Yes, the invitation for children to select and use their own toys or items found at home not only made the project accessible in a home-based environment, it also helped to give children the opportunity to become decision-makers about the characters and objects with which they wanted to engage and include in their story. The family engagement, as you noted, was an important part of the experience in this virtual platform, and it emulated what we often see in our museum's Tinkering Lab and other exhibits: children and their adults sharing a learning experience together. Thanks again!

Thanks for your thoughts, Leigh! We have been delighted at the response from parents and children - how much they enjoy and take time (upwards of an hour in some cases) to engage in these activities at home, and to learn more about how these experiences get discussed by families subsequent to the experience (in our current project, reconnecting with families via Zoom a couple weeks after the tinkering activity)

Very interesting work! In addition to looking into how much families talk during tinkering (and the quality of that talk), have you noticed any trends in parents versus children within a family? One of the challenges that parents faced during the pandemic was that they had to "become teachers" on a short notice, and I would suspect that your rich video data can probably speak to what some successful examples of that look like (or what learning processes might be involved). Have you noticed anything in the narratives in that regard?

Hi Brad! We are interested in how the story can support iterating one's initial design. One place to look at this, as you suggest, is when a test of the design happens. We do plan to look at whether families who choose to iterate their design (a measure of persistence in the engineering design process) are referencing their story when trying to design what to alter and change. 

Hi Nickolay! In the coding I am currently working on I am exploring how the prompts families are given relate to whether and how young children and their caregivers create their own engineering rich stories as they build. Across our projects there are differing levels of story information families are given related to the basic story structure Catherine mentioned (character: self or other, problem/conflict, setting). For instance, in Here to there (i.e., ramps example in our video) they are given a basic story problem/conflict (sending something here to there) and the families get to be inserted in their own story by deciding what they are sending and to whom. The conversations/story during the activity then focus on what they want to send and why. I consider these engineering stories because the child maintains the conflict and is relieved and happy when there is a safe resolution.

In our Teeny Tiny playground activity (the video introduction example) project the story elements are focused on what the child and caregiver imagine a character would want built and they have more room to create an external conflict. Here we are finding that families will name their characters and children will discuss character preferences but not necessarily bring up any conflict.  Finally, in a project we are just starting to explore (under the bed) children are discussing the different aspects of the story because it has less engineering qualities and parents (perhaps because they are unsure on how to navigate the task) are having to refocus their child on the engineering elements. In this project, we are finding that families create their character and come up with a problem/conflict and we find that children are taking a lot of time to give their character personal characteristics and engage in the problem/conflict. So overall, across projects, we’re seeing that differences in story information in the prompt are related to differences in who brings up aspects of both the engineering and story aspects as families are building. But of course, this is something I am still coding and exploring! I find the conversation of what makes story and narrative study similar/different very important so thanks for asking us about this.

Thank you for this opportunity to talk more about stories!   

Narratives and stories are culturally determined ways of communicating lived or imagined experiences (Bruner, 1996). These forms of oral discourse capture ever-changing human knowledge and provide us with a window into how individuals make sense of their experience. We aim to harness to power of stories for constructing new understandings of science and engineering in ways that make  learning stick (e.g., Roediger & McDaniel, 2014).

In conceptualizing story and its role in learning we draw on work by Bruner, Mandler, Dalhstrom, Klassen, and others who describe how stories can offer a natural causal organization that can aid understanding of the relations between ideas and events (e.g., story schema). Although the definition of stories varies across different theories, the essential elements include characters (real, imagined, the self), problems, actions to solve problems, and outcomes/impacts. In addition to these, evaluations and expressions of emotions in stories are from our perspective crucial in helping learners construct learning that is memorable and usable over time. 

Graciela, Lauren and Diana can share some of the stories families have been telling in our work.

Thank you all for a wonderful discussion!

In one of the activities featured in our video, families are invited to make a hat that will fit the child’s head. Some families have received a story prompt along with the activity (the hat is for a party of their choosing) while others have not. For families who receive the story prompt, the stories created during tinkering include several narrative elements, such as the type of party being held (e.g., a birthday or Christmas party), who the party is for (e.g., the target child or their best friend), who is invited to the party (e.g., immediate and extended family members, even household pets!), and where the party will take place (e.g., in their backyard, in the North Pole!).

We have also built in a complication into this activity, with families also having to make sure that the child’s hat doesn’t fall off when jumping up and down. Early observations suggest that this complication leads to more engagement in the engineering practices of testing and redesigning, as families often find out that their hat requires some modifications! 

Thank you Graciela, Catherine and Diana! The examples, references and your detailed commentary have been most helpful for me to understand your work better and that is one of the main reasons why I value these discussions - they clarify and enhance the presentations. I am eager to look further into the literature that you suggest.

If interested, check out the proceedings from the Science through Narrative symposium at the 2018 conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, published in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Vol 58, Issue 6, for an even broader interpretation of story and narrative that I found helpful. Thank you for the thoughtful discussion!

Hi Graciela and Catherine and David!  What a cool project!  I can see how it combines all of your interests and expertise in a really cool way.  And I can see why you visited our video on "Learning with Purpose as a Strength for Learning" and how it connects.  

In your story settings, it seems that you create a purpose for building and exploring.  In our video we emphasize having a purpose that benefits a larger group -- would you say that your stories create that too?  Maybe if the children see the toys as animate, then they are benefitting an imaginary group?  Hmm.  

Best regards,  Barbara

Hi Jennifer! I loved your video, and I definitely see overlaps between our work! We analyze most of our data by transcribing family's conversations and then coding what they talk about. For this process, we typically use CLAN transcription and coding software. We also code video interactions using Noldus Observer. But as you've suggested, this detailed video analysis can be a time consuming process! Over the past year, we've started doing "blitz coding" of the videos before we begin detailed analyses. There are some behaviors--such as testing or mentioning characters--that are easier to notice and code. Atlas and NVivo are two programs that are great for this kind of quick data analysis. What software or methods have you used so far to examine your data? Our team is always excited to hear about new approaches to analysis!

Hi Lauren, Thanks for your response. We are newbies at video analysis. We use nVivo to analyze our reflections and focus groups, but the videos I analyzed last summer I did by hand. I was looking for an easier, quicker process. I like this idea of blitz coding. Is that your own term and protocol?

Hi Valerie, great question! Next steps involve using what we are learning from this project to create and adapt programming in Tinkering Lab, the tinkering exhibit at Chicago Children’s Museum. We hope to introduce opportunities for story-based tinkering in this space that will support children’s engineering learning and spatial thinking.

I watched your video and it is so great to see that narratives and role-play allow students from underrepresented groups to engage in STEM. Such great work!

Hi Pendred, thank you for your comment and for inviting us to view your video! I am excited to learn more about the use of narratives in your work. Heading to your video now!

Hi Ying! Thanks so much for the comment! We analyze video data we collect via a zoom call (the tinkering and an interview after). We then touch base with them around two weeks after to ask questions about what they remember. We are examining those follow-up interviews now! I am excited to pop over to your video and see the work you're doing.

Thanks so much for the kind words Sue Allen! I will look up that Tufts study and see what I find.

Hi Cristine! We are currently coding engineering behaviors (e.g., planning, testing, iterating and goal). I am familiar with your work (I worked on the explain explore grant with Maureen) so I will say that in some ways troubleshooting and iterating are intimately related if not the same thing. We do have someone who has looked at persistence.I believe that paper is going to be published soon. If it is I will send it along. 

Andy, Thank you! We see these moments in the museum, and were so pleased to be able to capture them at home via Zoom. One thing we did to increase the naturalness was have the researcher turn their video off while families were tinkering (assuring the family she would still be there, but just didn't want to distract them). What we see is very genuine! And we think what we are learning will be helpful as we transition back to observations in the museum, hopefully in the Fall. 

Thanks so much Dr. Melzoff! The payoff for children inner Here to There projects is one of the nicest things we are seeing!