Praxistemology: Early childhood education, engineering education in a university, and universal concepts for people of all ages and abilities

Abstract

Existential tinkering as a form of inquiry must be brought into the engineering curriculum at the university level, as well as into the education curricula in general, including early childhood education. This paper presents a methodology of education for people of all ages and abilities, including engineering education, through unstructured play, personal involvement (authenticity), expression, and exploration -playful tinkering -as forms of inquiry. Current methods of engineering education have too much emphasis on structure, creating rigidity that destroys the capacity for creativity and radical innovation and invention. We introduce "existinquiry/praxistemology" (existential tinkering as inquiry) as a learning methodology consisting of three parts: learning by thinking, learning by doing, and "learning by being" (existential education). The goal of this learning methodology is to create lateral thinkers who integrate ideas and methodologies normally associated with play, the arts, and the sciences, into the the creative thinking process of engineering and design. Our hope is that (1) existinquiry in engineeing education will create more competitive and versatile thinkers capable of solving more sophisticated problems; and (2) that combining concepts of engineering education with concepts of unstructured play that are normally associated with early childhood education, will result in more groundbreaking inventions. We playfully explore topics of Veillance (surveillance, sousveillance, reciprocal transparency, equiveillance/omniveillance, uberveillance, and dataveillance) and Natural User Interfaces with the fundamental Elements (earth, water, air, etc.). The methodologies are applicable to teaching engineering to children or adults of any age or ability. ENGUCATIONEngineering education helps train young minds with processes and procedures to solve problems. Operating under this schema works well in situations where the problems can be clearly defined in the context of "vertical thinking" and solving specific problems.But true creativity, including lateral-thinking, needs to be personal. Humans have a natural capacity to improvise and detect patterns as they occur. Entrepreneurs work in a similar way. They reorganize resources to create new value. The scope and shape of these resources can be diverse and dynamic depending on which industry they operate in.Engucation (Engineering Education) is an area of study that investigates teaching and learning in an engineering curriculum. Though several focii exist, optimizing student learning is a key goal of this field. Some approaches range from active learning, and increasing levels of agency (Scardamalia and Bereiter), and problem-based learning to the more traditional lecture-based delivery, and more recently, e-learning [1]. Active learning/thinking/roles encompass a personal involvement in each learners trajectory of understanding concepts, and works well with "higher levels of agency for children in knowledge building" [2]. The next level of active learn...

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