Art and Artifact of Children's Designing: A Situated Cognition Perspective

The purpose of this study was to investigate knowing and learning in an engineering design environment within an elementary classroom. Based on extensive ethnographic observation, video recordings, interviews with participants and observers, and children's design artifacts and engineering logbooks, fourth- and fifth-grade students' designing activities were interpreted from the perspective of situated cognition. The results show that children's designing was related to the artifacts, tools, materials, teacher-set constraints, and current trends in the setting. However, these elements cannot be taken as having some absolute ontology but are interpretively flexible. In the course of the engineering unit, the fourth- and fifth-grade students learned to exploit this interpretive flexibility to frame and solve problems. The emerging artifacts had at least two important functions: They were resources that structured the design process by both opening up possibilities and providing constraints, and they served to coordinate discursive and practical actions. The findings have important implications for affordances and constraints of learning environments in which designing is both a goal and a vehicle of instruction and for the evaluation of students' activities in such settings.