#840: Collaborative Lore Development as a Mediational Bridge Between Material and Playworlds

This study examines how playful, collaborative development of project-related lore can mediate learning in a making-focused STEM learning environment. We present a case study of two intersectionally-marginalized seventh-grade girls who initially distanced themselves from STEM-related materials and practices but came to create a robotic character, “Mr. Evil French Cheeto”. To understand the evolution of their participation, we employ a Vygotskian perspective on play, extended by theories of storytelling, imaginative world-building, and identity-resources. Through a microethnographic analysis of video and audio data from a ten-week in-school maker program, we explore how lore—the evolving narrative about the character and his world—generated iterative exchanges between the girls’ imaginative playworld and the constraint-laiden material world. Our findings suggest that collaborative lore development can be a promising avenue for supporting agency, authorship, and problem-solving, and may have the potential to open up expansive pathways for equitable participation in STEM-related learning environments.