CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Designing Virtual Worlds for Children - A Developmental Study of How Children Act, Perceive, and Reason Spatially

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Virtual environments can revolutionize how we inform young people's thinking about 3 dimensional (3D) objects, which is known as spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning and thinking are fundamental components of success in STEM fields and critically important to our nation's future success. Moreover, there is a positive effect of action or "learning-by-doing" in STEM classrooms. Virtual environments are ideal for promoting action-based learning because of their flexibility in creating 3D, immersive, accessible, and interactive spaces that can simulate many contexts across a spectrum of skills in spatial reasoning, from simple to complex. Previously, virtual environment technology was not easily usable by children at critical ages for the development of spatial reasoning. This team, consisting of computer scientists and cognitive scientists, will develop a comprehensive understanding of how children perceive and act in virtual environments, and how their spatial reasoning capabilities can be understood and applied in the real world. Using the results of this work, designers of virtual environments should be able to effectively implement technologies that provide learning-by-doing and harness the positive effects of action on cognition. Much of STEM learning relies on spatial thinking, and virtual environments provide a natural tool to facilitate such learning. Children are a key group of STEM learners, but researchers have only begun to investigate their spatial perception and reasoning in immersive virtual spaces due to previous inaccessibility of the technology. The team's research program will develop a basis for understanding how children perceive, act, and reason about space in immersive virtual environments. The team will explore how both locomotion and feedback from the virtual environment in the form of self-avatars impact perception-action and spatial learning in children. In these endeavors, we will examine individual differences among groups of children based on factors such as age, gender, and characterizations of spatial abilities. These differences will be analyzed to derive actionable recommendations on how to design virtual environments and customize active learning methods to best benefit children at different development stages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.