Research has consistently highlighted the importance of promoting child-parent interactions. In this essay, we describe the development of MAKEngineering kits that provide collaborative learning experiences for children in Grades 2-6 to engage in engineering design tasks with members of their families in their home environment. First, we present…

Following a learning experience with one of her Year 2 students, whose extreme and challenging behavior required extra support from a teaching assistant (TA) but who loved practical hands-on science days and investigations, it occurred to the author that there must be hundreds of children and TAs all over the UK facing challenging dilemmas every…

PEOE (predict, explain, observe, explain) is a strategy that supports conceptual change (Dial et al. 2009). "Conceptual change" is a process through which students can change their understandings, ideas, or beliefs (diSessa 1993; Konicek-Moran and Keeley 2015). This style of lesson allows students to express their scientific ideas…

STEM family e-learning involves increasing the engagement in STEM home learning activities. STEM home learning activities range from exploring subjects such as science technology, engineering, and maths through a fun play based K-6 STEM curriculum. The family are trained to act as teachers, mentors, and coaches to the K-6 members. Families from…

Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are pedagogical approaches that allow teachers to integrate multiple subjects into creative multi-day learning experiences that captivate students' curiosity and engage them in real-life problem solving. MEAs are known in the fields of mathematics and engineering (Gilat and Amit 2014), but despite their ability to…

Asking questions is an important way of acquiring information and knowledge and plays a significant role in a child's learning processes. In this study, we examine what characterises the questions asked by children to their teachers in two kindergartens (4-6-year-olds) and six primary school classes (2nd-4th grade) when situated in a natural…

When it snows, children are permitted to play outside during recess, which causes them to experience a variety of problems with their mittens or gloves. To align instruction with a problem student's experience in every day life, the authors developed and administered a short survey to second graders in an after school program. The authors found…

The Pelican's Nest, located near Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico, is a science center supported by a local educational foundation. Programs are geared toward marine wildlife and the coastal habitat with an emphasis on hands-on learning for students in grades K-6. The director of the science center conducts daily classroom labs and discovery trips…

Scientific modeling, the practice of creating models such as "diagrams, analogies, and simulations" (NGSS Lead States 2013) allows students to develop and revise their own representations of the natural world and use them to generate predictions and explanations about scientific phenomenon. Research provides evidence for elementary…

Drawing on Latour's (Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor--network-theory, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005), this manuscript discusses a study of a robotics class in a public, Title I elementary school. Compared with theoretical frameworks (e.g., constructivism and constructionism) dominant in the field of early childhood…

In this article, second graders learn the basics of engineering through an exploration of magnetic levitation (maglev) technology. The author designed and taught the lessons to a class of 26 students enrolled in a month-long summer science program. The maglev lessons took place over three mornings (15 minutes for the first lesson and 40 minutes…

Picture this: a PhD chemist, PhD science educator, and a preservice Latina elementary educator walk into an aftercare program for primary and intermediate students from a rural school. These students are identified as low income and at risk and therefore eligible to participate in this school-provided aftercare. While across the state, these same…

This study, a sub-study of a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project, applies a modified strategy of the U[superscript 2]MC for an eight-week afterschool robotics curriculum to promote upper elementary students' computational thinking in the second grade. Twenty-one students in second grade participated in a Life on Mars project…

When working within a meaningful context quite young students are capable of working with sophisticated data. Year 3 students investigate thermal insulation and the transfer of heat in a STEM inquiry, developing skills in measuring temperature by conducting a statistical investigation, and using a stylised graph to interpret their data.

In a 2012 blog post, John Maeda discusses the idea that while science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education plays an important role in innovation, limitations exist when we focus exclusively on STEM. Maeda advocates for the addition of the "A" for Art to the acronym, insisting that the arts promote the creativity and…