Somos Ingenieros/We are Engineers
From Stories to Solutions: Engaging Families as Design Partners to Advance Informal Engineering Learning Opportunities for Young Children
This NSF-funded project involved community leaders at Palenque LSNA, educators at Chicago Children’s Museum (CCM), and researchers at Loyola University Chicago. The project aimed to advance approaches to the co-creation of early informal engineering learning opportunities for community and museum settings. Palenque and CCM facilitators explored strategies for centering oral storytelling as a potentially powerful tool for empowering family design partners to create playful, hands-on early engineering activities that were relatable and meaningful for them. In turn, the resulting activities from the co-design sessions formed community-based informal engineering program in CCM’s Tinkering Lab exhibit during the summer of 2025. We are studying whether and to what extent the co-designed programs impacted family engineering learning in community- and museum-based settings. Additionally, the project is identifying practices for effectively sharing the co-design process and first-person voices of family co-design partners, and how doing so might impact the engineering engagement and stories of connection and belonging expressed by other families participating in the programs in community and museum settings.
From Stories to Solutions: Engaging Families as Design Partners to Advance Informal Engineering Learning Opportunities for Young Children
This NSF-funded project involved community leaders at Palenque LSNA, educators at Chicago Children’s Museum (CCM), and researchers at Loyola University Chicago. The project aimed to advance approaches to the co-creation of early informal engineering learning opportunities for community and museum settings. Palenque and CCM facilitators explored strategies for centering oral storytelling as a potentially powerful tool for empowering family design partners to create playful, hands-on early engineering activities that were relatable and meaningful for them. In turn, the resulting activities from the co-design sessions formed community-based informal engineering program in CCM’s Tinkering Lab exhibit during the summer of 2025. We are studying whether and to what extent the co-designed programs impacted family engineering learning in community- and museum-based settings. Additionally, the project is identifying practices for effectively sharing the co-design process and first-person voices of family co-design partners, and how doing so might impact the engineering engagement and stories of connection and belonging expressed by other families participating in the programs in community and museum settings.