Laying the foundation for a lifetime of creativity and innovation: When young children engage in early engineering activities, they build a strong cognitive foundation for later STEAM learning while developing important traits and life skills such as creativity, observation, problem-solving, persistence, and teamwork.

About Engineering Explorers

Bringing out the engineer in every child

How can we add a second floor to our block house? If we raise this end of our ramp, will our toy truck roll down faster?

Children naturally engage in engineering exploration and discovery early in life. By harnessing their innate curiosity about how things work—and how to make them work better—we can prepare the early learners of today to be the innovators and problem-solvers of tomorrow.

To give early childhood educators the knowledge and skills they need to teach young children how to “think like engineers,” the University of Illinois Chicago College of Education launched the Engineering Explorers Project in 2024 with a generous gift from Marjorie Pelino.

Today, early childhood professionals and parents around the world visit our Engineering Explorers website to learn how to integrate engineering into their early learning environments and activities.

Engineering Explorers has four core objectives:

  1. To give early childhood educators the knowledge and skills they need to teach early engineering
  2. To help early childhood educators set up environments that promote problem- solving and design thinking
  3. To provide engaging activities and lessons that foster the development of early engineering skills
  4. To cultivate scientifically literate citizens who have the skills and knowledge they need to address societal problems and make well-informed decisions about issues such as climate change, public health and technology

We are grateful to Marjorie Pelino for making this pioneering project possible.

Questions or comments? Please contact us at info@engineeringexplorers.org.

About the University of Illinois Chicago

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a community of scholars committed to educational equity and social, political and economic parity. UIC develops new knowledge about education that improves teaching, learning and assessment; informs policy and practice; and is valued by the communities that it serves. The university directs its teaching, research and public service to all learners, with an emphasis on learners in urban environments.

About the UIC College of Education

The College of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago strives to prepare the next generation of educators, educational leaders and educational researchers to establish equity in Chicago public schools. Making good on the promise of public education requires us to acknowledge and address the problems of inequality explicitly and courageously so that the public education system can help all children achieve their full potential.