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

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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.