Supporting Latine Children's Informal Engineering Learning Through Tinkering and Oral Storytelling

Providing equitable informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning opportunities to young children from diverse backgrounds may be a way to increase access and interest in STEM and can help to address the broader goal of increasing representation. Importantly, these learning experiences must be meaningful and engage everyday cultural practices. Guided by a strengths-based approach, the current study examines how oral stories as a cultural resource can be harnessed to support Latine children's engagement in a tinkering activity. The project explores whether and how setting an at-home tinkering activity within a story context engenders rich parent-child conversations that provide engineering learning opportunities for young children. Fifty-two Latine parents and children (M-age = 7.69 years; 23 girls; 90.4% Mexican heritage) were randomly assigned to either hear a story as a frame for a hands-on tinkering activity or to engage in the same tinkering activity without the story. After families finished tinkering, a researcher elicited the children's reflections about their tinkering experience. Approximately 2 weeks after the activity, children were asked to share their tinkering reflections with a second researcher. Parents and children in the story condition talked more about engineering during tinkering, and these children also talked more about engineering during both reflections than did children in the no-story condition. These findings suggest that integrating oral storytelling into tinkering activities is a promising future direction for the creation of more equitable informal engineering learning opportunities for Latine children and families.