Design challenges build a strong foundation for children’s future learning in the STEM fields. In the sections that follow, you’ll find tinkering, making, and engineering challenges that are appropriate for preschoolers and kindergartners. These experiences are open-ended enough to be adapted for children in the early elementary grades. Each activity is keyed to a piece of children’s literature, which teachers read in large- or small-group settings. This offers a way to integrate STEM concepts with early literacy as well as with other areas of development and content learning.

All of the activities in this issue are geared toward building and constructing. Each begins with an invitation to tinker with and explore materials and tools. Through this tinkering, children develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions as they figure out how materials and tools work, how to take things apart, and how to put things together. They get to experience the process of iteration—when something doesn’t work, children are encouraged to try another strategy or use different materials or tools.

Next, the challenges provide a prompt for children to make or build something. To add complexity, each experience includes an engineering challenge (titled “More Challenging”). This last task includes constraints or requirements to consider while using the same process as engineers, who follow a series of steps when they investigate a problem and try to come up with a solution. There are many variations on this model, but the basic steps are these:

• Think about it. What is the problem? Brainstorm ideas. What materials do you have or need? Make a plan. Draw or sketch your ideas.
• Build or create it. Gather the materials you need and build or create the solution you came up with.
• Try it. Test your creation.
• Revise or make it better. What works and what doesn’t? How could you change it to make it better? Try it again.
• Share it. Show someone else your creation. Talk about how you made it. Listen to their ideas about how they might improve it.

Young children might not follow these steps in a linear fashion, and through a variety of modifications, each of these challenges progresses from simple to complex. This means that children will be able to take many different pathways in their explorations. You can use your understanding of children’s knowledge, skills, interests, social and cultural contexts, and abilities to adjust each challenge to meet the strengths and needs of those in your setting.

With their strong emphasis on STEM, the following activities enable children to apply skills in science, technology, engineering, and math in ways that are meaningful and engaging. The integration of the arts encourages creative expression and innovation, complementing the STEM focus. These activities also provide opportunities for using and strengthening important executive function skills, such as planning, focusing attention, organizing information, persisting, thinking flexibly, and solving problems. They cultivate an understanding and confidence that every child is capable of engaging in STEM. Taken together, these skills are important in school and in life. Implementing these challenges helps prepare children to solve the problems of the future.

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