Sound Making with Tangible Personal Artifacts and Electronic Construction Kits to Foster Engineering Practices

The STEM field faces dropout issues across the globe, leading to a smaller proportion of STEM graduates compared to graduates in other majors. Providing early engineering education to young people can give them exposure and experience that can help prevent dropout issues. One way to engage youth in early engineering education is through personally meaningful projects, with sound making as one promising context. Sound is personally meaningful because it can connect to a person’s experiences and represent them. Building on constructionist perspectives, this qualitative study investigated engineering practices in a sound making activity using conductive and non-conductive materials for the representation of tangible personal artifacts. The study explored three electronic sound-making kits: littleBits Synth Kit, Playtronica Playtron, and Squishy Circuits. Open-ended construction kits allowed for more tinkering with materials and projects, and provided better support for engineering design practices throughout the activity compared to more closed kits. This study shows that sound making with tangible personal artifacts is a productive context for engineering explorations. Furthermore, this study suggests that the concept of the personally meaningful in constructionism could be expanded to include materializing personal histories through sound making, which could support learners in their personal projects.