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支持儿童的学术准备以及数学和阅读的成就，然而，我们对他们何时出现或如何在早期发展中提高他们知之甚少。最早和最容易获得的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。用积木搭建建筑物是非常复杂的，这使得我们很难详细描述孩子们是如何搭建建筑物的，为什么他们有时会挣扎，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，强大和自动化的技术，用于描述儿童的建筑行为，并阐明“新手”和“专家”儿童建筑师所采取的不同建筑路径。它的多学科方法推进了对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。该项目产生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对有前途的发展的投资，这些发展建立了一个连贯的、累积的知识库，重点关注高杠杆主题。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，包括我们创建和理解信息的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-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关注。与教育和人力资源核心研究计划的使命，支持在STEM学习的基础研究，结合理论，技术和观点，从广泛的学科和背景相一致，在这个项目中开发的空间技能编码系统结合了视频和运动跟踪儿童的积木。这将使研究人员能够从比以往任何时候都更多的儿童那里收集和描述数据，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”表现的特征作为对“新手”构建者的指导输入。它使用传统的认知方法沿着机器学习技术来表征儿童积木的构建过程及其发展方式，将产生可扩展的工具，可供科学家和教育工作者用于表征，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.