Learning Engineering Design through Making: Affordances of a Nonformal Tinkering Environment

The maker movement has been increasingly adopted as a means for promoting interdisciplinary approaches to STEM learning. However, empirical evidence regarding how making supports the development of engineering design skills remains limited and inconclusive. This study provides an in-depth examination of a nonformal educational initiative grounded in tinkering, a creative and improvisational subset of making, by analyzing the tasks undertaken by primary school children in a tinkering setting. Our results confirm the capacity of tinkering activities to foster specific engineering design practices and elucidate the interrelationships between them. Furthermore, the findings highlight the potential of such approaches to facilitate the progression of students’ expertise throughout the design process. This work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of tinkering, offering insights for the design of effective pedagogical strategies to promote engineering design learning in informal settings.