Can tinkering benefit pupils’ learning?

Abstract

The current National Curriculum for design and technology specifies that pupils use an iterative design process, work collaboratively and explore new technologies. Therefore, teachers must plan lessons to incorporate these strategies in order to promote pupils’ progress sufficiently.

This study focuses on a key stage 3 textiles class in a secondary school where an e-textiles lesson was written into the scheme of learning in order to implement the new initiatives. Tinkering was trialled as a teaching strategy and its success was measured by the progression of pupils’ knowledge.

The pupils were set a series of challenges to guide their exploration of electronic textiles components, working iteratively to solve the problem of high demand. The results revealed that pupils’ knowledge did increase following the tinkering lesson. Therefore, these results may facilitate improvements in future teaching strategies to inform practice and meet the government requirements.