TALES Practitioner Guide

Chicago Children’s Museum (CCM) and Loyola University Chicago (LUC) have a nearly 20-year history of research-to-practice partnership that enables us to collectively better understand children and families’ learning in informal STEM environments, and for CCM to take a data driven approach to the design and implementation of its programs. Our most recent collaboration, TALES (Tinkering and Learning Engineering Stories) Project (NSF grant #1906940/1906839/1906808), enabled us to explore the role of story and narrative in deepening families’ engineering learning. The project utilized daily programing in CCM’s Tinkering Lab, as well as a set of virtual tinkering programs during the pandemic, as sites for learning. Some of the specific questions we set out to explore were:

• What design and facilitation approaches engage young children and their caregivers in creating their own engineering-rich stories?
• How can museum exhibit design and tinkering stories together engender spatial thinking to further enrich early STEM learning opportunities?
• Do the tinkering stories children and their families tell support lasting STEM learning?

This Practitioner Guide features Tinkering activity plans and findings from this project, including story prompts, engineering prompts, and making prompts developed and tested in this project.