Characterizing and improving children's block-building skills: Interdisciplinary studies using approaches from cognitive science and computer science

理解和推理物体之间空间关系的能力支持儿童在数学和阅读方面的学术准备和成就，然而，我们对它们何时出现或如何在早期发展中提高它们知之甚少。最早和最容易获得的空间技能之一是儿童的积木游戏——用物理积木建造结构。用积木建造是非常复杂的，这使得很难详细描述孩子们是如何建造结构的，为什么他们有时会遇到困难，以及如何提高他们的技能。利用传统的观察方法和计算机科学的进步，该项目创建了详细的、健壮的和自动的技术来描述儿童的建筑行为，并阐明了“新手”和“专家”儿童建筑者所采取的不同建筑路径。它的多学科方法推进了人们如何学习以及如何更有效地使用STEM知识的理解前沿。该项目生产的工具将提供新的方法来衡量正式和非正式学习环境中的空间技能，并有可能改变我们对早期积木作为学习标志的看法。通过这种方式，该项目反映了NSF在有前途的发展方面的投资，这些发展建立了一个连贯的、累积的知识库，专注于高杠杆主题。空间技能代表了人类知识的一个基本方面，支持广泛的认知功能，包括我们创造和理解信息的二维和三维空间表示的能力。该项目侧重于最早发展但高度复杂的空间技能之一——砌块建筑，由于其在正式和非正式学习环境中对幼儿的可及性和适应性，在认知和教育领域都引起了人们的关注。与教育和人力资源核心研究项目的使命一致，该项目支持STEM学习的基础研究，该研究结合了来自广泛学科和背景的理论、技术和观点，该项目开发的空间技能编码系统结合了儿童积木构建的视频和运动跟踪。这将使研究人员能够从比以往更多的儿童中收集和描述数据，将这些关于积木构建的数据与其他学术相关技能联系起来，并将儿童“专家”表现的特征作为“新手”构建者的教学输入。它使用传统的认知方法和机器学习技术来描述儿童积木构建的过程及其发展方式，这将产生可扩展的工具，科学家和教育工作者可以使用这些工具来描述、分析和促进最年轻学习者的空间技能发展。

The ability to understand and reason about the spatial relationships among objects supports children's academic readiness and achievements in math and reading yet, we know little about when they emerge or how to improve them during early development. One of the earliest and most accessible windows into spatial skills is children's block play--building structures with physical blocks. Building with blocks is surprisingly complex, which makes it difficult to characterize in detail how children build structures, why they sometimes struggle, and what can be done to improve their skills. Drawing on traditional observational methods and advancements in computer science, this project creates detailed, robust, and automatic techniques for characterizing children's building behaviors and articulating the different building paths taken by "novice" and "expert" child builders. Its multidisciplinary approach advances the frontiers of understanding about how people learn, and how they might use their STEM knowledge more effectively. The tools produced by the project will offer new ways to measure spatial skills in formal and informal learning settings, and has the potential to change the way we think about early block-building as a marker for learning. In this way the project reflects NSF's investments in promising developments that build a coherent, cumulative knowledge base, focusing on high-leverage topics.Spatial skills represent a fundamental aspect of human knowledge, supporting a wide range of cognitive functions including our ability to create and understand 2- and 3-D spatial representations of information. This project focuses on one of the earliest developing yet highly complex spatial skills--block building--which has garnered attention in both cognitive and educational arenas due to its accessibility and adaptability for young children in formal and informal learning contexts. Consistent with the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's mission of supporting fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts, the spatial skills coding system developed in this project combines video and motion tracking of children's block building. This will allow researchers to gather and characterize data from much larger numbers of children than ever before, to relate these data on block-building to other academically-relevant skills, and to use the characterization of child "expert" performance as instructional input to "novice" builders. Its use of traditional cognitive methods along with machine learning techniques to characterize the process of children's block building and how it develops will generate scalable tools that can be used by scientists and educators to characterize, analyze, and promote development of spatial skills in our youngest learners.