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Making engages young people with the material world and reflection-in-action, creating promising science learning contexts. Emphasizing relational and social dimensions of making, we conducted a week-long workshop for middle schoolers who are current and aspiring pet companions. Supporting participants’ inquiry into pets’ senses and related behaviors, we asked them to work on maker projects meant to improve their pets’ lives. Following a qualitative analysis of participants’ positioning in relation to their pets, we present case studies of two female participants’ positioning. We find that through the process of making, the two participants demonstrated an increased awareness of pets’ biology and related behavior and their personal interests in pet care, while also differing in what aspects of human-pet relations they focused on. We conclude that through making, especially in contexts with a robust relational draw, youth become attentive to complex and otherwise difficult-to-notice transactions central to taking care of pets. 

Based on the widely recognized situated nature of identity and youth as social producers and products, this qualitative case study reports findings from a week-long informal pet-sciences workshop for middle schoolers who have existing relationships with pets or a strong interest in future pet companionship. Mindful of the structure-agency dialectic, we analyze youth’s wayfaring and trajectories of identification as they learn about their pets at the workshop, accounting for how youth see themselves and their pets and are seen by others. In contrast to a commonly assumed analytic directionality seeing people as moving towards or away from STEM, we find that there were different ways for youth to meaningfully engage themselves in learning about their pets at the workshop. We conclude that attention to fluidity in youth’s identifications can inform us, the adults in the community, of the need to affirm the many possible trajectories that youth may follow. 

Pets are beloved family members in many cultures. Companionship with pets motivates and positions humans as inquirers as they find out their pets' experiences with them. With the need to advance science education from dualist notions of the world and the learner as separate entities, our research team conducted a two-week online summer camp to engage teens and their pets in investigations around pets' senses. Following a qualitative analysis of participants' talk and projects at the workshop, we found that teens engaged in science learning practices while investigating aspects of their pets' lives and designing experiences for them. Additionally, participants adopted an ecological and relational approach to science learning that positioned themselves and their pets as subjects. We discuss implications for future work with pets, and for the design of other STEM learning environments that engage perspective-taking, empathy, and care. 

Participatory Design (PD) aims to minimize the unintended consequences of designs and innovations by inviting users to engage in the process (Muller & Druin, 2012). Designing with some users—for example, pets—is challenging because pets communicate in unique ways. But it holds promise because pets and humans are companions. Expecting teens' relationships with pets to motivate them to be co-designers, we organized a virtual summer workshop engaging teens in activities to understand their canine and feline pets better and design an experience to improve their pets’ lives. We analyzed video recordings of teens' engagement at the camp and their descriptions of their experience design projects using qualitative thematic analysis. We found that caring and loving relationships with pets are also contexts for engaging in a systematic design process.