Praxistemology: Early childhood education, engineering education in a university, and universal concepts for people of all ages and abilities

Existential tinkering as a form of inquiry must be brought into the engineering curriculum at the university level, as well as into the education curricula in general, including early childhood education. This paper presents a methodology of education for people of all ages and abilities, including engineering education, through unstructured play, personal involvement (authenticity), expression, and exploration - playful tinkering - as forms of inquiry. Current methods of engineering education have too much emphasis on structure, creating rigidity that destroys the capacity for creativity and radical innovation and invention. We introduce “existinquiry/praxistemology” (existential tinkering as inquiry) as a learning methodology consisting of three parts: learning by thinking, learning by doing, and “learning by being” (existential education). The goal of this learning methodology is to create lateral thinkers who integrate ideas and methodologies normally associated with play, the arts, and the sciences, into the the creative thinking process of engineering and design. Our hope is that (1) existinquiry in engineeing education will create more competitive and versatile thinkers capable of solving more sophisticated problems; and (2) that combining concepts of engineering education with concepts of unstructured play that are normally associated with early childhood education, will result in more groundbreaking inventions. We playfully explore topics of Veillance (surveillance, sousveillance, reciprocal transparency, equiveillance/omniveillance, uberveillance, and dataveillance) and Natural User Interfaces with the fundamental Elements (earth, water, air, etc.). The methodologies are applicable to teaching engineering to children or adults of any age or ability.