Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Studying Preschool Engineering Learning

Children are born with a drive to engineer. Young children tinker, imagine, transform, and create, with little difference between the interest and abilities of boys and girls. But diversity within the engineering profession is poor, with women making up less than 17% of engineers. By studying children’s engineering play, we seek to learn how to keep young girls engaged with engineering for longer. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we can build up a picture of young children’s engineering learning. Here we discuss using Engineering Habits of Mind (qualitative) and Engineering Play Behaviours (quantitative) with video data collected from preschools and forest nurseries in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas.