Poster #7 - Children’s Development of Path Planning Strategies when Sequencing Directional Instructions

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Planning a path from an origin to a destination is a common task for studying children’s spatial reasoning. For young children who are still acquiring directional language like left and right, planning the steps of a route can be challenging. Verbalizing the instructions for another person or agent to move in sequential steps makes the task more complex. This talk presents research on children’s development of strategies for path planning on a 2D grid with a tangible agent and manipulable directional arrows. Findings suggest the implication of literacy conventions, symbolic meanings, and abstraction in spatial planning.

We conducted qualitative analytic coding of video-recordings of children engaging in a series of spatial tasks. Participants were school children (n=272) age 5, 6, and 7 years old in a semi-rural area in the United States. Tasks were designed to assess children’s ability to sequence directional instructions for an agent (i.e., small wooden robot toy) to move along a path on a 2D 12x12 square grid (Figure 1). Children were provided with a series of different grids depicting storyboards that situated the tasks. For example, five initial tasks involved the robot carrying trash (e.g., a banana peel, a cardboard box) to one of two different trash cans. In some tasks, children were given a collection of small wooden tiles depicting four individual arrows: rotate right on a point, rotate left on a point, move forward one square, and move backward one square. By sequencing these tiles as instructions for movements, children represented their plans for the robot’s route.

We found that, despite being repeatedly reminded to line up the arrow instructions in a row underneath the grid (“left to right like reading a book”), children developed a range of different strategies for sequencing the instructions (Figure 2). Some children placed the arrows inside each grid square. Others assembled the arrows in the shape of the path underneath the grid. Some stacked arrows in a tower vertically, while others placed arrows in random, nonlinear positions on the table. Children also interpreted the tasks creatively, sequencing instructions that sent the robot “elsewhere” in playful ways or planning a path that arrived at a destination image on the grid, even when the task did not call for that. We found developmental differences in the use of the arrows to sequence instructions, with seven-year-old children tending to sequence the path more linearly and less creatively than pre-literate 5 year-olds.

Path planning in the context of these sorts of tasks, where children give instructions to an agent for how to move around a gridded space, involves mapping a correspondence between at least two domains: the domain of the grid (path) and the domain of the arrow symbols (instructions). For researchers, children’s use of the arrows indicated how children were understanding the relationship between the path and the symbols. For children, the use of physical arrows as material anchors for path planning may allow them to access knowledge implicated in spatial planning, such as literacy conventions, symbolic meanings, and abstraction.

Authors

• Deborah Silvis, Utah State University
  Presenting Author

• Jody Clarke-Midura, Utah State University

• Jessica Shumway, Utah State University

• Victor R. Lee

• Katelyn Childers

• Haleigh Anderson