Young Children Volume 81 • No 2 Toward Intentional Teaching: The Need for Educator Agency | страница 64

Making and Tinkering with STEM: Preschool

© 2026 National Association for the Education of Young Children

Study Guide

› Engineering Design Challenges are planned hands-on STEM learning activities that provide children with the opportunity to design, build, test, and refine solutions to a problem.

› Key Features of a Design Challenge:

• Identify the Problem

• Collect and Tinker with Materials

• Consider STEM Concepts

• Define Design Challenge

• Implement Design Challenge

• Facilitate Children’ s Inquiry

• Connect Solution to the Story

› Nonlinear Engineering Process refers to the non-sequential nature in which the engineering design process is approached. Rather than completing one step and moving to the next in order, both adults and children more often than not move between phases as they brainstorm, build, test, and revise their designs. The steps in this process include:

• Think about it

• Build it or create it

• Try it

• Revise or improve it

• Share it

› Types of Design Challenges:

• Build It focuses on constructing creations. Concepts like stability, balance, and spatial relationships are explored.

• Move It encourages designing and testing moving parts or devices, with embedded concepts such as force, friction, and simple machines.

• Change It emphasizes transformation, such as repurposing objects into something new and mixing, molding, or reshaping materials, fostering curiosity about scientific properties.

• Invent It sparks creativity as children imagine and design new solutions to problems, promoting open-ended thinking and innovation.

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Making and Tinkering with STEM: Preschool

© 2026 National Association for the Education of Young Children

Study Guide

1. For each of the design challenges offered in Lesson 3, there are opportunities to deepen or extend children’ s learning. Select one of the four design challenges and complete it with children you work with. As a follow-up, do one of the Going Deeper activities from the table below. Reflect on children’ s learning of STEM concepts through the Design Challenge and how their understanding was deepened through the follow-up activity.( approximately 20 minutes)

Design Challenges

Build a Bridge

Move Like an Animal

Going Deeper Activities

Build a new bridge spanning at least 20 inches to cross a river twice as wide as the original. Make one that is strong enough to hold at least one billy goat.

OR

Create a bridge that goes up to allow large boats and ships to pass underneath. What other materials do you need?

Create an animal with more than two moving parts. Determine how to connect all the pieces.

OR

Compare your animal’ s movement to how that animal moves in the wild. What could you add to make your animal’ s movement seem more real?

Instrument Imagineer Create an instrument that makes different sounds.

Frame Factory

OR

Invite families to share items from home— such as pots, containers, or spoons— that children can experiment with to make sounds and music.

Set up an optical shop in the dramatic play area to try on the glasses you and your classmates created. Create and gather props, such as an eye chart, mirrors, sign-in sheet, and an examination chair.

OR

Explore the various tools and technologies designed to assist people with visual impairments, such as braille, white canes, and screen readers.

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Introduction Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3

LESSON 3

Design Challenges for Preschoolers

Lesson 4 Notes

References

Key Definitions / Concepts

As an IACET Accredited Provider, NAEYC offers IACET CEUs for its learning events that comply with the ANSI / IACET Continuing Education and Training Standard