MakeTechEarly – Skills building for children

Technology education starts in the kindergarten

MakeTechEarly is designed to enable children to develop problem-solving skills at an early age. The new project is directed at teacher training professionals with responsibility for training the early childhood educators of the future. It focuses on kindergarten-age introduction of the technical skills that are increasingly vital in our world ruled by technology and digitalisation.

In MakeTechEarly, specialist colleges of social pedagogy teach methods for use in early childhood education, in which complex topics are broken down into smaller action stages that motivate and encourage children to reach goals. The project also aims to enable even the youngest children to acquire hands-on experience of tinkering, building, designing and inventing as part of an exciting open-ended process of exploration.

The initiator of the project is Professor Bernd Zinn, Dean of Studies for Vocational Education, Teaching Technology, Science and Technology at the University of Stuttgart. He stresses, “Children are capable of far more than many of us think. At a very early age, they begin to acquire experiences that enable them to develop the ability to understand everyday technical problems and find their own solutions.” However, Professor Zinn points out that this ability requires targeted support and encouragement of those capabilities; the main purpose of the threeyear project is to initiate precisely that support.

The project is designed for lecturers at social pedagogy colleges to build the requisite skills, but also to equip early childhood education students at childcare facilities with the tools they need to initiate fundamental educational processes in technology and computer science.

Alongside the University of Stuttgart, the partners in the project are the Baden-Wuerttemberg Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports, the Baden-Wuerttemberg State Institute for School Quality and Teacher Training and the Baden-Wuerttemberg employers’ education and training organisation (Bildungswerk der Baden-Württembergischen Wirtschaft).

Visit the MakeTechEarly project

Gaining skills through play