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Understanding the relationship between families' creative engineering practices and products during engineering workshops in libraries and a museum

Author:
Kim, Soo-hyeon
Published:
[University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2019.
Physical Description:
1 electronic document
Additional Creators:
Zimmerman, Heather, 1971-
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Open Access.
Summary:
Understanding the nature of creativity and enhancing creative engineering practices, particularly within families, in making and tinkering learning settings has become an area that needs further research. In this dissertation, I developed Distributed Creativity across Everyday Expertise Framework to explore how families sociomaterial experiences influence the creative engineering practices and the products during family engineering workshops. I conceptualized creativity as a distributed and materially-grounded activity. As part of a larger design-based research project, this dissertation focused on the engineering programs held in five libraries and one museum in 2017 in which families used littleBits as prototyping tools to design engineering products at one-hour workshops. I took a naturalistic inquiry using both qualitative and quantitative analyses based on video-based interaction analysis of 31 parent-child pairs activities and creativity assessment of parent-child pairs products. Three main analyses were conducted: 1) artifact analysis of 31 parent-child pairs products from six informal learning settings, 2) interaction analysis of families creative engineering practices around episodes of novel idea and feasible solution generation for 17 parent-child pairs in the low novelty score group and 2 parent-child pairs in the high novelty score group, 3) interaction analysis of inter-family influence from five informal learning settings. Findings illustrated that collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials supported the emergence of novel ideas and feasible solutions. This study also provided an in-depth case of how collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering supported the familys creative engineering practices to interconnect, accumulate, and shape the final product. Furthermore, the study findings highlighted that sharing of ideas, prototypes, or products from one family supported propagation of ideas and influenced other families creative engineering practices and products. The dissertation findings bring practical implications related to the design of family engineering curricula at libraries and museums, and contribute to broadening our understanding of learners experiences as tools to engage in and support creative engineering practices. Findings also open up an area of future research to investigate how to guide learners participation in family workshop settings with new configuration of the distributed system at inter-family level. The study findings also bring theoretical implications to the growing conversation on creativity as a socially-distributed and materially-grounded activity rather than an accumulation of individual cognitive processes.
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Dissertation Note:
Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University 2019.
Reproduction Note:
Microfilm (positive). 1 reel ; 35 mm. (University Microfilms 29267332)
Technical Details:
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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