When children express themselves freely through making, they nurture critical character traits such as confidence and creative thinking. However, in a time when families are staying at home, parents often struggle to find high-quality hands-on learning experiences for their children, especially with limited time and materials. As a consequence, children spend more time passively watching screens and less time engaging with their environment and learning from these interactions.
Started as a Master's project for the Learning, Design, and Technology Masters' at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Dowit provides a series of workshops facilitated online that encourage young children to tinker, design, and build with recycled materials found at home.
Additionally, Dowit's mobile app encourages children to document their creations, reflect on their process, and celebrate their learning.
Since March 2020, I conducted more than 60 workshops for over 85 children from 5 to 8 years old, facilitating 40+ different activities. The objective is to provide children with an opportunity to express themselves creatively through making with recycled materials.
Dowit workshops are 30-minutes long and held on Zoom. Parents receive a link to the meeting by email after they fill up a registration form, as well as a blurb explaining the theme of the project and the materials required. Once it is time to start the workshop, participants join the Zoom video-conference and to join the activity.
In addition to the workshops, I developed the Dowit app. It serves as a portfolio to save children's creations as well as a platform to share relevant content such as activity tutorials and sign up for workshops.
Given the importance of reflection in the learning process, the Dowit app is an opportunity for children to reinforce their learning by sharing and reflecting on their creative process. It is also a way to increase parents' engagement by giving them a tool to document their children’s journey as creators.
Data from research conducted with regular participants showed an increase in their children's autonomy and agency in creating things at home with recycled materials. Parents shared stories of their children working independently on their own projects beyond the workshops, using cardboard and paper to complete their creations.
Another phenomenon emerged from the parents' feedback. They started collecting cardboard, toilet paper roll, and all kinds of materials specifically with the goal of providing for their children's making process, playing an engaged role as a partner in their children's learning journey.
Dowit's approach leverages recent research on creative learning and early childhood education. It builds on frameworks developed by Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, and Mitch Resnick, as well as research on growth mindset, maker education, play, and creativity.
My Master's thesis is currently waiting for approval and will be shared here shortly after it is published on Stanford libraries.
