Exploring the Affordances of Tangible Technologies in Scaffolding Spatial Concept Development in Preschoolers

• In Event: Understanding and Supporting Young Children's Computational Thinking

Abstract

Spatial skills are essential for everyday tasks; they help us solve problems by manipulating, constructing, and navigating the paths of objects as well as ourselves (Newcombe & Shipley, 2015). To gain knowledge of spatial tasks, multiple cognitive processes are required, including language comprehension and memory, which play vital roles in children’s development (Austin & Sweller, 2017). The critical window for children to acquire spatial skills is between the ages of 2 and 4 years old (Baykal et al., 2018).
We explored how preschool children develop understanding of spatial concepts as they interacted with a tangible technology during guided play. Sphero SPRK+ is a transparent spherical robot that can be controlled by a tablet or computer and can move in any direction at the speed specified by the children controlling it (Stefanut & Tripon, 2017). The site was a university laboratory preschool where the tangible technology was purposefully integrated into the curriculum in a classroom serving children ages 3-4 years old. We were guided by Actor Network Theory (ANT; Latour, 2005), a sociomaterial approach that disrupts the subject and gives agency to material objects, enabling an examination of humans and non-humans as actants that influence interactions during children’s play scenarios (Cho et al., 2017; Mustola, 2018).

We had two primary research purposes:
• To explore how a tangible technology scaffolds preschoolers’ understanding of spatial concepts.
• To investigate the relationship between a tangible technology and preschoolers’ verbal and non-verbal expressions during play.

Data sources include video documentation that provided a “fine-grained multimodal record” (Blikstad-Balas, 2018, p. 512) of the “resources and practices through which participants in interaction build their social activities and how their talk, facial expression, gaze, gesture and body elaborate one another” (Jewitt, 2012, p. 6). Each participating child completed a turn programming directions for Sphero to navigate a path during guided play with four children in the group and the teacher. As we were exploring relations involving human and non-human actors (Latour, 2005), we examined the verbal and nonverbal expressions of the teacher, children, and Sphero by tracing all actors in the activity. To identify and code the verbal spatial words, we used the System for Analyzing Children’s Language About Space (Cannon et al., 2007; Sheehan et al., 2019), focusing on three categories of the spatial language coding system - location/direction, orientation, and deictic.

Our findings confirm that pedagogical moments rely on both non-human and human agency. When creating a symmetry between human and non-human actants, one consequence is that acquiring skills entails more than the input received by the children through connecting with an adult’s knowledge. Sphero evoked a chain of actions, enacting pedagogic forces that transformed children’s learning. These experiences facilitated embodied exploration of specific spatial concepts through the operationalization of actions by the tangible technology. The additive effect of talking about spatial concepts, such as spatial features, relations, and orientations, combined with the inter-activity with Sphero enhanced children’s acquisition of spatial ideas relative to the quantity of children’s verbal expressions and complexity of their applied spatial skills.

Authors

• Ilene R. Berson, University of South Florida

• Michael J. Berson, University of South Florida

• Candice McKinnon

• Deeksha Thonta Aradhya, University of South Florida - Tampa

• May Alyaeesh, University of South Florida - Tampa