Chapter 6: Engineers and Storytellers: Using Robotic Manipulatives to Develop Technological Fluency in Early Childhood

Young children can be wonderful engineers and gifted storytellers. As caring adults, our role is to provide them with early experiences to enable them to flourish as both. We want children to discover the ways in which the man-made world comes to be, the design process involved in each tangible or digital object in our houses and neighborhood, as well as the underlying powerful mathematical ideas that enable engineers to design and build sturdy structures and complex machines. We want children to realize that physics is part of our everyday experience and that the scientific method is a useful tool not only for conducting experiments in a white coat lab, but also for testing our very own theories about the world.