Conference Program

In contemporary societies marked by uncertainty, complexity, and contested knowledge, science education must engage students not only with established concepts but with the epistemic practices through which scientific knowledge is generated and negotiated. Responding to calls to move beyond deterministic views of science (Levrini, Pietrocola, & Erduran, 2024), this contribution explores how structured problem posing and reflective documentation can foster early forms of scientific citizenship in primary education.

The paper presents a design-based research project conducted in fourth-grade classrooms engaged in a sequence of four Light Play tinkering sessions, in which the available materials and tools were progressively expanded across sessions.
Overall, the study highlights the pedagogical potential of combining informal constructionist practices (Papert, 1980) with formal curricula and disciplinary knowledge.
In fact, the design of the activities was informed by the TIDE Canvas (Rini & Ricciardi, 2025): the tinkering sessions were followed by “cold debriefs”, supported by two documentation tools: a collective Question Map and a personal Journal of Light.
These moments invited children to revisit their ideas through documentation (Giudici et al 2001), reconnect with emerging questions, and build conceptual bridges between tinkering experiences and disciplinary knowledge of light and shadow.
Documentation artefacts functioned as boundary objects (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011), enabling students and teachers to negotiate emerging problems and orient subsequent experimentation.

This iterative process resonates with Resnick’s learning spiral (2013; 2017) and can be interpreted as an enactment of its principles within tinkering-based learning supporting science learning at primary school, fostering emotional engagement, creativity, and scientific depth.

The findings underline the importance of equipping teachers with tools to facilitate this “third moment", ensuring that tinkering does not remain an isolated creative episode but a sustainable pathway toward creativity, identity, critical thinking, and disciplinary understanding.

Rather than organising inquiry around pre-framed research questions, the design sustained the articulation, stabilisation, and collective refinement of students’ own problem formulations. Documentation rendered epistemic processes visible, supported negotiation of uncertainty, and enabled shared decision-making about which questions deserved further investigation. In this sense, the classroom increasingly functioned as a community of inquiry, modelling forms of epistemic participation relevant to scientific citizenship (Greco et al., 2008). Such conditions resonate with post-normal understandings of science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993), where uncertainty is intrinsic and deliberation becomes central.

The study suggests that NOS-informed, design-based approaches can create early educational experiences that prepare students to engage with science as a situated, negotiated, and socially consequential practice.