Fostering informal educators' capacity to support young children's computational thinking through caregiver engagement and education

The National Science Foundation awarded Louisiana State University $837,170 on September 15, 2025, under the STEM Education program (CFDA 47.076) to develop and research a story-based approach to fostering computational thinking among young children through informal educators and caregiver engagement.

The project will create a guidebook and professional learning materials for informal educators in libraries and museums on how to support caregivers in extending a "tinker-telling" approach—discovery-based tinkering activities embedded in stories—to computational thinking at home using everyday materials. The project team, informal educators, and caregivers will iteratively co-design, test, and refine the guidebook. Research will measure whether professional learning experiences and guidebook use increase children's computational thinking skills and dispositions and promote caregivers' confidence in supporting computational thinking. The guidebook will be disseminated widely through professional associations of libraries, museums, and other informal learning institutions, with focus on rural regions across the United States.

Place of performance is Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The period of performance runs from September 15, 2025, through August 31, 2028.

Abstract

Computational thinking is central to many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers of the future, yet many young children do not have opportunities to develop the computational thinking (CT) skills that lay the foundation for future STEM trajectories leading to these careers. This project will address this opportunity GAP through developing and researching a story-based approach to fostering computational thinking among young children. As part of this approach, in the context of stories, children will use discovery-based tinkering activities to develop solutions to problems using computational thinking. While children will initially use this tinker-telling approach in the context of libraries and museums, the project will provide professional learning materials and opportunities to informal educators in these settings on how they can, in turn, support caregivers in extending the tinker-telling approach to computational thinking using stories and everyday materials in their homes. The project team, informal educators, and caregivers will iteratively CO-design, test, and refine a guidebook, which will highlight how to teach computational thinking through playful story-based tinkering in museums, libraries, and homes. Research will explore whether and how the professional learning experiences, and the use of the guidebook, increase children's computational thinking skills and dispositions, as well as promote caregivers' sense of confidence in supporting computational thinking among their young children. The guidebook will be disseminated widely through professional associations of libraries, museums, and other informal learning institutions, with a focus on rural regions across the united states. Ultimately, this project is intended to result in improved CT skills and dispositions by resulting in an empirically tested guidebook on how to provide effective CT learning experiences for young children within and across informal settings. Mixed-method design-based implementation research will be used to iteratively develop, evaluate, and refine developmentally appropriate methods for encouraging CT skills and dispositions for children from ages four to eight. These methods include play-based approaches to supporting computational thinking, via stories and tinkering, in the context of libraries and museums. Informal educators in these settings will further learn how to support caregivers in extending the CT learning experiences in their homes. Mixed methods research will investigate whether and how the professional learning experiences, in conjunction with the guidebook, supported the informal educators' capacity to use tinker-telling to build computational thinking among young children. Research will further explore whether and how the guidebook supported caregivers' confidence and capacity in supporting their children's development of CT dispositions and skills. Finally, this research will examine the extent to which the tinker-telling approach promoted the development of CT dispositions and skills among children. The empirical research resulting from this project will be published to audiences of STEM educational researchers and informal educators. Given that millions of families visit museums or libraries each year, this project has the potential to expand the number of people prepared to enter CT-based careers, by resulting in empirically based approaches on how library and museum educators can provide experiences and materials to families that enable them to build their children's computational thinking at home. This integrating research and practice project is funded by the advancing informal STEM learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are not planned for this award.