Inquiry-based STEM
Project Support
This page guides you on developing an inquiry-based STEM project as part of Little Scientists House certification or the Early STEM Education Awards 2026.
Becoming a Little Scientists House allows you to showcase to parents and the community that your setting is delivering best practice inquiry-based STEM education. The biennial Early STEM Education Awards are the only awards in Australia dedicated to celebrating STEM excellence in early childhood education and proudly recognise educators of children 0-8 years who champion STEM in their setting.
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The project guidance on this page applies to projects developed as part of Little Scientists House certification and the 2026 Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards, as they both follow the Little Scientists project inquiry cycle. This means your House project can double up as your Awards nomination!
Whether you’re developing an inquiry-based STEM project for the first or sixth time, please read the project support sections below carefully:
Before you start a project, have you undertaken a suitable amount of STEM professional development? To support you, our Online Workshop: Inquiry-Based STEM Projects will support educators to co-develop and document a high-quality STEM project with their children. Purchase a 30-day recording.
What is an inquiry-based STEM project?
An inquiry-based STEM project follows the project inquiry cycle (below). It starts with selecting a single research question sparked by an observation, interest, or question raised by your children, for example “Why are spiderwebs sticky?”, and then progresses through each stage of the cycle. A project is different from an open-ended activity, like exploring spiders.
The focus of an inquiry-based STEM project is on process and learning (rather than quickly finding an answer), which means your project should explore the research topic over several weeks or months. This ensures your children have time to fully develop their hypotheses and conduct research and experiments. This child-centred approach encourages children to make decisions and feel a strong sense of agency at all stages of the inquiry cycle, whereas the role of the educator is to support, facilitate, and witness. If children have limited verbal or physical skills, educators can take on a larger role in interpreting and documenting the children’s observations and learnings.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Little Scientists’ Project Inquiry Cycle provides a structured yet flexible framework within which educators and children can co-develop an inquiry-based STEM project. The project inquiry cycle below is interactive. Click on a cycle stage to reveal more information or download or print this cycle as a PDF.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 1. Select a research question
that captivates the children
An inquiry-based STEM project explores one specific research question — for example, Why are spiderwebs sticky? — as opposed to an open-ended activity like Exploring spiders. It’s important that your research question topic is meaningful and internally motivating for the children, which is why the research question should be sparked by a question they ask, an observation they make, or one of their interests.
Every single day, children ask questions and express interests that could form the basis of your next inquiry-based STEM project. What phenomena or interests have captured the children’s attention lately? For verbal children, what questions are they asking you? Some children (often 0-3-year-olds) will present their interests and questions in non-verbal ways, i.e. through their explorations, gazes, and curiosity during play.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 2. Collect children’s prior
knowledge & hypotheses
What do the children know about this topic already? What related experiences have they had? What are their ideas and hypotheses about what might happen during their project or what they might learn? Parents and carers can be a valuable source of information about children’s prior knowledge, particularly for the 0-3-year-olds.
Asking children about their prior knowledge helps the children develop an awareness of what they already know. This forms a foundation upon which to build and anchor new knowledge.
Inviting children to share ideas and hypotheses supports them to engage in critical thinking, lays the groundwork for experimentation in Stage 3, and will be returned to and reflected on in Stage 6.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 3. Children conduct
research & experiments
The children should be central in researching their question and planning their experiments. Ask them: What extra information do they need? What experiments do they want to conduct? What materials or resources do they need? Where should they conduct experiments? Educators can support the children to find suitable methods for testing their ideas and conducting their experiments.
This is the stage of the project where most time is typically spent. Children’s enthusiasm for testing ideas and repeating experiments may last many weeks! Please do not rush this stage. Give the children as much time as they need to fully explore, re-test, and experiment.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 4. Children observe & describe
Ask the children what they are observing during their experiments. Ask them to describe what is happening and what they see, hear, and feel. What differences or changes do they notice? Their observations may lead to decisions around what new experiments need to be conducted!
Encouraging children to describe their observations fosters language development, helps to consolidate their learning, and gives the educator insight into what new knowledge children are gaining. This stage also allows the educator to draw the children’s attention to certain features by asking questions, providing prompts, and pointing things out.
During the course of the project, children may want to return to Stages 2, 3, & 4 many times as they gain new information that prompts new hypotheses & testing. Allow time for this.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 5. Children document results
There are many ways to document scientific research and children should be involved in deciding how to document the results of their experiments. For instance, the children can draw, take photos, engage in a dramatic performance, record videos and voice notes, design posters, and much more. What methods do they choose?
Documentation is an important tool for reflection. It helps the children recall the result of their experiments long after they’ve concluded and fosters a feeling of ownership over the research process.
Project Inquiry Cycle
Stage 6. Children reflect upon results
Discussion helps children to reflect, evaluate their hypotheses, and consolidate new knowledge. Start by referring to the initial research question and recall each child’s hypotheses. You could ask them: What did you want to find out? What did you think might happen?
Next, support the children to recall each step of the project and the methods they used: What did you do and how did you do it? How did you solve this problem?
Then, discuss the results of the experiments and help the children form conclusions. Have we answered our research question? Have any of our hypotheses proven to be right? What have you learnt? Consider the children’s prior knowledge and link the results of the research back to this.
When to start an inquiry-based STEM project
Before you embark on your project, it’s essential for the relevant educators to undertake STEM professional development with Little Scientists. You will draw on these new STEM skills and pedagogy to develop a high-quality inquiry-based STEM project as part of your Little Scientists House certification or Early STEM Education Awards nomination. (Read about PD eligibility specific to House certification.)
🟢 Step 1. Watch this 10-minute video with Little Scientists’ Ana-Luisa Franco as she explains each stage of the project inquiry cycle in more detail.
🟢 Step 2. Print the project inquiry cycle and stick it to a wall in your service where it’s easy to refer to during your project.
🟢 Step 3. Read through the entire House application or Awards nomination form to understand the project information you’ll need to provide. The project submission questions mirror each stage of the project inquiry cycle and some stages require you to upload documentation. We suggest you create a word document where you can add notes and develop your written responses to the application form while your project is in progress to help you remember and organise information as you go
🟢 Step 4. Discuss as a team: Do all of the project stages feel clear? Are there any opportunities or challenges within your educational context you can identify and workshop ahead of time?
Examples of inquiry-based STEM projects
Documenting your project
High‑quality documentation is central to your inquiry‑based STEM project. Documentation compliments your written reflections and provides a more holistic and authentic representation of the children’s learning and how the project progressed. The aim is to make children’s learning visible in a way that is also meaningful and manageable and supports strong planning through the EYLF and MTOP.
As part of your project submission, you are asked to upload documentation for four stages of the project inquiry cycle: Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 5, and Stage 6. For example, for Stage 2, your written response will outline the prior knowledge, experiences, ideas, and hypotheses your children shared. Your documentation will then help to illustrate this and might includes photos of children engaged in conversation, a mind map the educator has scribed with the children, a transcript of the children’s conversation where children, and/or children’s drawings.
Combine your files
Documentation tips
Tip #1. Document the Project at Each Stage
Collect documentation incrementally as you move through each stage of the project. You don’t need a special “project documentation system”. Your everyday tools — Floorbooks, daily reflections, jottings, observations, annotated samples, photos, videos, learning stories, etc. — are sufficient and already naturally capture children’s investigations over time without adding extra work. Don’t wait until the end of your project to gather documentation, as this will be challenging and you will lose the richness of the children’s process.
Tip #2. Document What Really Matters
Quality documentation doesn’t need to capture everything. Instead focus on the moments that show learning in action within each stage of the project. For example, children’s ideas and questions, their theories, problem‑solving, and processes, how their thinking changed, and what the group observed and explored.
Tip #3. Support Children to Lead their Documentation
Children should document their learning too, as this gives them agency and helps them reflect on their own thinking. If its useful, educators can add short annotations to support children’s work without taking over.
Select documentation methods that match the children’s interests, abilities, and the project research question. Options include visual or creative (drawings, sequences, diagrams, labelled sketches, models, storyboards), digital (child‑taken photos, short videos, audio reflections, simple stop‑motion), oral or collaborative (group conversations, dictated captions, peer interviews, reflection circles), symbols and representations (tallies, simple graphs, mark‑making, colour or symbol codes), or embodied approaches (re‑enactments, demonstrations, outdoor mapping, timelines made with loose parts).
Tip #4. Be Flexible About When Children Document
Children are often deeply absorbed in hands‑on learning. Instead of interrupting this, educators can support children to reflect and record their ideas when they’ve finished their experience, later in the day, or even the next day. This still captures their meaning‑making while protecting the integrity of their play and inquiry time.
Tip #5. Use Documentation as a Thinking Tool (Not Just a Record)
Documentation is about more than recording children’s learning. It’s also an active process that supports the iterative and reflective nature of STEM inquiry and helps children to revisit and extend earlier ideas, notice changes over time, build new questions, strengthen theories, and deepen understanding.
How will your STEM project will be assessed?
Having your project assessed as part of the Early STEM Education Awards or Little Scientists House certification is an important opportunity to gain feedback about your project strengths and development areas. This will allow you to run projects with even more confidence and expertise in the future. Projects are assessed against the following criteria:
Criteria 1. Does it follow the project inquiry cycle?
The emphasis of an inquiry-based STEM project is on process and learning and engages with a topic over an extended period of time of several weeks or months. Your project must follow the project inquiry cycle and will be assessed at each stage:
Stage 1. If your project research question was sparked by an observation, interest, or question raised by your children.
Stage 2. How children’s ideas and hypotheses were gathered and used. (Documentation required.)
Stage 3. How children were supported to engage in research and experimentation. (Documentation required.)
Stage 4. How children were supported to observe and describe what was happening.
Stage 5. How children documented their results. (Documentation required.)
Stage 6. How children were supported to reflect on what they had learned. (Documentation required.)
Criteria 2. Is it child-led?
The children’s ideas, decisions, and actions should be central at every stage of the project inquiry cycle. Children should feel a strong sense of agency throughout the project, which is why they must be given ample time to research, hypothesise, experiment, and document. In contrast, the educator’s role is to support, facilitate, co-construct, and witness. If children have more limited verbal or physical skills, educators can take on a larger role in interpreting and documenting the children’s observations and learnings
Criteria 3. Is STEM central?
Science, Technology, Engineering, and/or Mathematics concepts must be explored throughout a project in order for it to be considered an inquiry-based STEM project. When submitting the project for assessment, educators will need to clearly illustrate how STEM learning took place and what project experiences developed children’s foundational STEM skills, like critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and collaboration.