Technical developments and innovations shape our society and determine our everyday lives to a large extent. To ensure active participation in a technologized living environment, a profound technical socialization is necessary. Especially problem-solving serves as a natural action when interfering with technology and needs to be supported as early as possible. Yet, from a scientific point of view, there is little research on how children deal with technological problems and theoretical established models are rarely reviewed in practice.

Hence, this research work analyses how children between the age of nine and ten years solve a technological design-based problem. This age range was selected to rule out a strongly prejudiced positive or negative attitude towards technology. The children’s approach was recorded via video and in addition, a guided interview was conducted to reflect the children’s solution for the problem. The collected data was then evaluated with the help of content analyses.

The results show that nine- and ten-year-old children solve the technological design-based problem according to individual problem-solving patterns. A universal approach to problem solving cannot be recognized. Furthermore, in line with existing literature this study confirms that the problem-solving runs cyclical. The individual problem-solving steps are usually exercised repeatedly and occur more or less intensively with other steps of the problem-solving cycle, whereby they form loops. During the evaluation of the data, three different types of problem-solving variants were recognized. In a first variant, the children’s focus lies primarily on a thoughtful and intensive problem exploration and search for solution, while using materials they are not familiar with. In the second and third variant, the central focus of the children is on the implementation of a creative and imaginative solution. While children of the second solution variant turn to an intensive problem exploration and further search for solutions afterwards, children of the third solution variant hardly pay attention towards these steps and rarely take materials into account that are unknown to them.