Insights on students' own authentic design practices--nascent design practices without much adult guidance--are crucial to informing responsive facilitation of engineering design tasks. This study unpacks how elementary students interpret teacher given information about a design task, and interact with each other and given resources, to traverse a…

As digital integration transforms modern society, equipping young learners with computational thinking (CT) skills has become an essential educational goal. However, many education systems face challenges in adapting curricula to include CT, particularly in early childhood education where resources, teacher preparedness, and instructional design…

Instructional routines, like "Number Talks" and "Notice and Wonder," engage students in doing and then talking about their mathematical thinking. Number Talk routines are short mathematical discussions where students mentally solve and share the strategies they used to make sense of the problem. In comparison, the Notice and…

With the increasing importance of teaching STEM to young students, the engineering design process (EDP) has become a popular learning platform in K-12 STEM education. The engineering design process guides students in solving engineering problems, but there is a lack of understanding of how students utilize this process. In this study, we explored…

Boost young children's problem-solving skills and set them up for long-term success with the second edition of this practical guidebook! Enhanced with new lessons and timely topics--including equity and the use of makerspaces--this book will help you get all children ready for kindergarten by teaching them basic practices of engineering design and…

Simplified, reductionist approaches to curriculum design and delivery are pervasive in science education. In ecological curricula--particularly in, but not limited to K-12--biomes, ecosystems, habitats, and other units of study are simplified and presented as static, easily identified and described entities. Characteristics, components, and…

In this article, we present research on eight kindergarten and eight first-grade students' understandings of the arithmetic properties of commutativity, additive identity, and additive inverse during a classroom teaching experiment, selected from a larger study that included 88 students. In this study, we explore the students' types of…

In this study, the effects of design-oriented STEM activities on preschool children were examined. In the research conducted with case study in qualitative research designs, 20 preschool children aged five years in a kindergarten formed the participants of the study. Design Oriented STEM Activities were completed with 24 sessions of 8 weeks, 3…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

Argumentation is an important aspect in the field of education because of its impact on learning processes. At the same time, argumentation is a complex activity in terms of cognitive, relational, emotional and social dynamics. In this paper, I investigate and I describe possible difficulties encountered by children during the argumentative…

Engineering has led the way in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, including developing masks that reduce transmission, digital tools that allow contact tracing, and vaccines that show promise to put an end to the pandemic and allow a more normal way of life. Society is not only "following the science," but is also applying principles…

The recent popularity of computational thinking (CT) and the desire to apply CT in our daily lives have prompted the need for a successful pedagogical technique for learning CT in K-12 education. The application of co-design pedagogical techniques has the potential to improve students' CT learning through knowledge sharing and the creation of…

Young children love opportunities to build, discover, and solve problems. Teachers can take advantage of these natural tendencies by introducing students to aspects of engineering design while they engage in classroom activities. Engineering also lends itself to supporting students in developing disciplinary literacy practices such as learning…

Existing computational thinking (CT) research focuses on programming in K-12 education; however, there are challenges in introducing it into the formal disciplines. Therefore, we propose the introduction of non-programming plugged learning in mathematics to develop students' CT. The research and teaching teams collaborated to develop an…

The authors illustrate how using design thinking allows learners to empathize with the perspectives of others, engage in collaborative problem-solving, practice communicating effectively, and respond to struggle or failure throughout the process.