Siblings May Be the Secret Engineers of Early Childhood Learning

When researchers talk about how young children learn science and engineering, the conversation almost always circles back to the same cast of characters: parents who read with their children, teachers who design classroom activities, and educators who run after-school STEM clubs. A new study from Binghamton University and Indiana University argues that this picture is missing one of the most familiar figures in a child’s life. Older siblings, the researchers suggest, may be powerful and largely overlooked agents of early engineering education, shaping how young children think, build, negotiate, and solve problems in the informal setting of their own homes.

The study, published in the Journal of Engineering Education under the title “Beyond parents and educators: Older siblings as influential figures in nonformal engineering contexts,” was led by Amber Simpson, associate professor at Binghamton University, together with Sawsan Werfelli and Kelli Paul. Rather than observing children in a laboratory or a classroom, the team brought the research into family living rooms. They recorded nearly thirteen hours of video capturing six pairs of siblings, ages two through eight, as they worked on engineering projects at home. The projects were deliberately hands-on and open-ended: building a rain gauge, constructing a paper roller coaster, and designing an animal house sturdy enough to protect animals from the elements.

These tasks were not casual play, at least not in the analytical sense. Engineering, at its core, involves defining problems, iterating on designs, testing structures against constraints, and revising based on failure. A rain gauge requires thinking about measurement and weather exposure. A paper roller coaster demands attention to gravity, momentum, and structural stability. An animal house forces a young builder to consider the needs of a living thing and the environmental conditions it must withstand. By filming sibling pairs as they tackled these challenges, the researchers could observe not just what children built, but how they communicated, divided labor, handled disagreement, and adapted when designs did not work as intended.

What emerged from the footage was strikingly consistent. Across the six pairs, the researchers identified clear and recurring roles that the older siblings assumed during the projects. The most common arrangement was what the team describes as a colleague or peer relationship. In this mode, both siblings worked side by side on the task, with the older child deliberately positioning the younger one as a partner or collaborator rather than an assistant. This egalitarian posture is notable because it mirrors the collaborative norms that professional engineers strive for in design teams, and because it suggests that older children can spontaneously adopt them without adult prompting.

The second role the researchers documented was that of the lead engineer. Here, the older sibling was clearly in charge of the project, directing the flow of work and making the key decisions. The video examples revealed variation within this role. In some recordings, the younger sibling was effectively ignored, sidelined while the older child pressed ahead. In others, the younger sibling waited patiently for instructions before carrying out each step, functioning almost like a junior team member executing a supervisor’s plan. Either way, the older sibling took ownership of the engineering process, from planning through execution, in a way that resembles how a project lead might organize a small design team.

The third and most unexpected role was that of the provocateur. In several recorded episodes, the older sibling intentionally teased or provoked emotional reactions from the younger sibling during the task. Provocation might sound like a distraction, or even a barrier to learning, but the researchers found it often had the opposite effect. In one example, being provoked did not derail the project at all; instead, it pushed the younger sibling to defend their own opinions to the older one, articulating reasons for their design choices under pressure. In other instances, the younger child stayed engaged with the engineering problem even in the wake of teasing, and that continued engagement helped move the pair toward solving the problem at hand.

This finding carries real weight for anyone thinking about how young children develop technical reasoning. Defending a design decision, even to a teasing older brother or sister, requires a child to explain why a structure should be built a certain way, to anticipate objections, and to marshal evidence from what they can see and touch. These are the seeds of engineering argumentation, a skill that formal schooling often tries to cultivate much later. The home environment, with its emotional intimacy and low stakes, appears to give children a space to practice these exchanges in ways they cannot easily replicate with friends, teachers, or classmates.

The researchers emphasize that the roles siblings adopted depended heavily on the existing relationship between the two children, and that the working relationships they developed during the projects varied considerably from pair to pair. There was no single script. Some pairs drifted between roles, moving from collaboration to direction and back again within a single session. What remained constant was the underlying capacity of the older sibling to function as a natural and effective teacher, drawing on years of shared history, mutual trust, and an intuitive understanding of what the younger child could and could not yet do.

That capacity is precisely what makes the study’s implications interesting for educators and program designers. Simpson and her colleagues suggest that more educational engineering programs should be developed that deliberately tap into the sibling relationship, both at home and in after-school settings. Instead of treating siblings as separate participants in a program, or viewing the older child’s involvement as a distraction, curricula could be designed to harness the older sibling as a facilitator, giving pairs structured challenges that invite collaboration while leaving room for the natural dynamics of teasing, negotiation, and leadership to play out.

The broader lesson may be that engineering education does not begin in a classroom, and it does not depend solely on adults. It begins on the living room floor, where a seven-year-old and a four-year-old argue about whether the roller coaster track needs another loop, or whether the animal house roof will hold up in the rain. By recording and analyzing those moments, this study gives researchers and educators a new window into how children learn to think like engineers, and it makes a compelling case that the sibling bond, so often treated as background noise in education research, deserves a central place in the conversation about how the youngest learners build their first ideas about design, structure, and problem solving.

Subject of Research: The roles older siblings play in young children's informal engineering learning during at-home STEM projects

Article Title: Study: Sibling interactions are an untapped resource for early engineering education

Article References: Study: Sibling interactions are an untapped resource for early engineering education. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: sibling interactions, engineering education, early childhood learning, STEM education, informal learning, Binghamton University, Journal of Engineering Education, observational study, nonformal education, collaborative learning, child development, at-home projects