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.