SBIR PHASE I: Kidcode: Software for Young Children's Exploration of Symbolic Representation

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9561725 Baker This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project will conduct a formative evaluation to design and implement prototype software that allows children in the age range 5-7 years to explore symbolic representations in a variety of domains by developing codes and coded representations of text, pictures, and animations. The software, Kidcode, is intended to supplement the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) curriculum standards by focusing on mathematical representation as an act of communication. Whereas the NCTM approach takes concrete experience with real objects as its starting point and gradually develops cognitive links to abstract representations, the software proposed here would encourage children to manipulate and explore symbolic representations for the purposes of communication. The pedagogical objective of the proposed software is to help young children develop an understanding of symbolic representation in many of its manifestations through experiences creating codes and decoding the communications of their peers. Educators often recommend that phonetics be taught alongside invented spelling and other whole language techniques for reading. Similarly, fostering exploration of symbolic representations as part of a mathematics curriculum based on the NCTM standards is likely to lead to a deeper understanding of the linkages between concrete activities and the symbolic representations used in NCTM style exercises. Such an understanding will allow children to more readily develop the capacity for using mathematical languages to model the real world. Moreover, because symbolic representations are the foundation for language development in all of its forms, the educational software to be develop will offer opportunities for children to practice reading and writing skills and so see mathematics as a descriptive language in analogy to spoken or written English. The Kidcode software has the potential to become an important additional resource avail able to support the mathematics curriculum in elementary and preschools. Moreover, because use of symbolic representations cuts across the language arts and mathematics curricula, it could become an essential element in the software libraries of these schools. In addition, the objective of the project is to design software that is intrinsically interesting to children so that they choose to use it on their own. If successful, Intellinet, Inc. will develop the software for the rapidly growing market for educational software for the home, thus playing an important broad role in the support of mathematical learning of young children.