Understanding the nature of creativity and enhancing creative engineering practices, particularly within families, in making and tinkering learning settings has become an area that needs further research. In this dissertation, I developed Distributed Creativity across Everyday Expertise Framework to explore how families' sociomaterial experiences influence the creative engineering practices and the products during family engineering workshops. I conceptualized creativity as a distributed and materially-grounded activity. As part of a larger design-based research project, this dissertation focused on the engineering programs held in five libraries and one museum in 2017 in which families used littleBits as prototyping tools to design engineering products at one-hour workshops. I took a naturalistic inquiry using both qualitative and quantitative analyses based on video-based interaction analysis of 31 parent-child pairs' activities and creativity assessment of parent-child pairs' products. Three main analyses were conducted: (1) artifact analysis of 31 parent-child pairs' products from six informal learning settings; (2) interaction analysis of families' creative engineering practices around episodes of novel idea and feasible solution generation for 17 parent-child pairs in the low novelty score group and 2 parent-child pairs in the high novelty score group; (3) interaction analysis of inter-family influence from five informal learning settings. Findings illustrated that collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials supported the emergence of novel ideas and feasible solutions. This study also provided an in-depth case of how collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering supported the family's creative engineering practices to interconnect, accumulate, and shape the final product. Furthermore, the study findings highlighted that sharing of ideas, prototypes, or products from one family supported propagation of ideas and influenced other families' creative engineering practices and products. The dissertation findings bring practical implications related to the design of family engineering curricula at libraries and museums, and contribute to broadening our understanding of learners' experiences as tools to engage in and support creative engineering practices. Findings also open up an area of future research to investigate how to guide learners' participation in family workshop settings with new configuration of the distributed system at inter-family level. The study findings also bring theoretical implications to the growing conversation on creativity as a socially-distributed and materially-grounded activity rather than an accumulation of individual cognitive processes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]