Papertronic Puppets: Teaching STEM and Storytelling Through Creative Construction

This innovative practice full paper finds that story-telling through animatronics can offer a combination of creativity and engineering in order to engage students in an inquiry-based approach to STEM learning. Animatronics is the art and science of bringing a story to life through robotic puppetry. Typically reserved for trained engineers with ample resources, animatronics can be an expressive yet inaccessible medium. We aim to allow students to write, create, and perform an animatronic story, learning valuable technical skills along the way. Our study, which took place over the course of eight weeks, investigates the use of our Paper Animatronics Kit in a Grade 2 and Grade 6 classroom, following the progression of their creative writing, animatronic building, and mentoring processes. We present results of our qualitative analysis of student and teacher interviews and group discussions.