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的空间关系的能力有助于孩子们在学习上做好准备，并在数学和阅读方面取得成就。然而，我们对这些东西何时出现，或者如何在早期发展中提高它们知之甚少。最早和最容易接触到空间技能的窗口之一是儿童的积木游戏--用物理积木建造结构。用积木建造建筑令人惊讶地复杂，这使得很难详细描述儿童是如何建造建筑的，为什么他们有时会挣扎，以及可以做些什么来提高他们的技能。这个项目借鉴了传统的观察方法和计算机科学的进步，创造了详细、健壮和自动化的技术来表征儿童的建筑行为，并阐明了“新手”和“专家”儿童建造者所采取的不同建筑路径。它的多学科方法推动了人们如何学习以及如何更有效地使用他们的STEM知识的理解前沿。该项目制作的工具将提供在正式和非正式学习环境中衡量空间技能的新方法，并有可能改变我们认为早期积木作为学习标志的方式。通过这种方式，该项目反映了NSF对有前景的开发的投资，这些开发建立了一个连贯的、累积的知识库，专注于高杠杆主题。空间技能代表着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2-D和3-D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--积木建造--由于其对幼儿在正规和非正规学习环境中的可及性和适应性而在认知和教育领域引起了关注。与教育和人力资源核心研究计划支持STEM学习基础研究的使命一致，该计划结合了来自广泛学科和背景的理论、技术和视角，该项目开发的空间技能编码系统结合了儿童积木的视频和运动跟踪。这将允许研究人员从比以往任何时候都多的儿童那里收集和表征数据，将这些关于积木的数据与其他与学术相关的技能联系起来，并将儿童“专家”表现的表征作为对“新手”建造者的指导输入。它使用传统的认知方法和机器学习技术来表征儿童积木的过程以及它是如何发展的，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表征、分析和促进我们最年轻的学习者的空间技能的发展。

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.