Keywords

1 Introduction

This chapter draws on the doctoral research of the first author that uses educational experimental intervention into everyday family practice to create motivating conditions for children’s spatial development in the home settings. Spatial reasoning skills, the ability to mentally visualise and transform objects, are crucial for participation and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Wai et al., 2009). Spatial skills are not innate, but malleable with input and practice across all ages (Uttal et al., 2013). Longstanding research suggest that adults can help support children develop spatial skills by using spatial language, gesturing, playing with blocks, puzzles and shapes (Verdine et al., 2014), reading spatial books, or working with maps (Newcombe & Frick, 2010). However, despite an increasing interest in understanding spatial learning in young children, research into the role of digital play in children’s spatial development are very limited (Polinsky et al., 2021).

Many young children are comfortable using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for both educational and entertainment purposes (Rideout & Robb, 2020; Barr, 2019; Flynn et al., 2019; Lieberman et al., 2009). Mindfully used, digital technology can offer learning affordances for children through everyday practices (Barr, 2019; Gee et al., 2018) and can extend learning affordances through play for young children beyond, and complementary to, traditional toys (Stephen, 2015; Lieberman et al., 2009; Cascales et al., 2013).

In times of pandemic with strict physical distancing rules, children’s access to learning in early years became very restricted. This research offers a set of design principles guided by pedagogical thinking supported by Conceptual PlayWorld that supports children’s learning in home settings. We offer evidence that shows digital games can create new motivational conditions for spatial thinking and concept learning in the home setting.

In designing and building three spatial games to be used in a family educational experiment, we aim to create new developmental conditions and introduce amplified and complementary spatial learning opportunities through digital materials. This chapter will present both the approach to developing the games and to engaging with families while using them to help create motivating conditions for children’s spatial development in the home. A sample slice of data detailing family interactions as children play on one of the apps is presented as an illustrative example.

2 Digital Tools and Children’s Conceptual Thinking in Early Years

Well-designed games can help children develop abstract thinking and foster positive learning habits, such as persistence and creativity (Lai et al., 2018; Verenikina et al., 2010; Stephen, 2015; Lieberman et al., 2009). Games have been shown to support social and emotional skills (Zhao & Linaza-Iglesias, 2015) and academic areas such as literacy and STEM thinking (Meyer, 2013; Ormsby et al., 2011). Lowrie and Jorgensen (2015) suggest that “gaming may well be the next major influence on learning and education” (p. 2). Cultural-historical perspective calls for studying children’s development in the everyday settings, where relevant and familiar cultural tools are used by both participants and researchers (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008). In our larger study, we are investigating how different types of resources help provide spatial learning affordances for children in the home. It makes sense that digital resources, such as mobile game apps, are included, in addition to concrete resources such as picture books and physical games. Digital technology can complement and amplify traditional learning experiences, or make possible spatial learning experiences through play for children that may not otherwise be available.

3 Design of the Study

From the researcher’s perspective, our role in executing this family educational experiment consists of two stages. The first stage is related to theoretical development, which involves understanding pathways for children’s spatial reasoning development in terms of the different spatial reasoning skills and activities and experiences to support spatial learning. Additionally, fundamental characteristics in designing resources that can engage young children must be considered. The second stage is about practice development, which involves engaging with the family to investigate how they participate in spatial tasks and spatial thinking. We need to work with families to introduce the new spatial resources to them and see how they use the provided resources to create new conditions for spatial development in their homes.

4 Theoretical Foundation of the Game Design

Our game design approach was guided by the Conceptual PlayWorld (Fleer, 2018) pedagogical intervention model involving storytelling, spatial reasoning literature, and games literature on how to engage young children as well as what they are capable of doing using their fine motor skills.

In Conceptual PlayWorlds, adults and children collectively enter an imaginary situation, overcome challenges to help the characters, and learn concepts in the service of play. Adults take on a central role to help sustain the play. In our games, we tried to borrow from the Conceptual PlayWorld’s characteristics of storytelling, emotional engagement, and problem solving as part of play. Adults are invited to provide instructions and help children through the games to sustain their engagement and support their learning. In doing so, the adults also become more conscious of spatial concepts, and perhaps influence other family practices to support spatial learning.

Children who hear more spatial language tend to have better spatial reasoning skills (Pruden et al., 2011; Verdine et al., 2014). In our apps, we chose books containing many spatial words, such as the prepositional words, ‘over’, and ‘under’, in Rosie’s Walk (Hutchins, 2015), and chose puzzles with many different shapes. We also included different types of shapes, as well as types of particular shapes such as triangles (right-angled, isosceles) to draw attention to what properties define a triangle (Newcombe & Frick, 2010). Spatial transformations, such as mental rotation and translation, are important spatial reasoning skills (Levine et al., 1999; Verdine et al., 2014), the puzzles in Fun Shapes, Winter Quilt and 3 Little Pigs provide opportunities to practice them. Through both puzzle design and explicit instructions, we encourage families to use prepositional words, words relating to dimensions and shapes, such as ‘big’, ‘long’, and ‘triangle’, and words describing spatial transformation, such as ‘turn’ or ‘rotate’.

A very important consideration for children’s digital play is social interactions (Barr, 2019; Yelland, 2005; Stephen et al., 2008), and this is what we advocate for in our research methodology. The apps by themselves are not enough. We ask parents to sit with their children while they are playing and give them hints and help as needed, using spatial terms such as ‘turn’, ‘on top of’, ‘big’, ‘triangle’. This can be seen in the data presented in the later part of the chapter.

A number of other features of games environment to help children stay engaged (Lieberman et al., 2009) that we also drew on include instructions, repetition and progression of increasing difficulty through different levels, and encouragement and help through visual and verbal feedback. We have also chosen contents that are familiar to the children, such as farm animals, as well as the use of bright colours and cheerful background music. Last but not least, because of young children’s developing fine motor skills and therefore differing abilities to use different gestures for touch screens (Nacher et al., 2015; Aziz et al., 2014; Lanna & Oro, 2019), we needed to build the apps such that young children could interact with them effectively. While tapping is easily done by most preschool aged children, drag and drop is a little more difficult for two-year-olds, and rotation is difficult for three-year-olds and under (Nacher et al., 2015; Aziz et al., 2014), although Nacher et al. (2015) found that the children could perform these gestures after receiving help from adults. Therefore, we designed the games such that single tap gesture is all that is required to play Rosie and Winter Quilt, single tap gesture and single-finger drag-and-drop for 3 Little Pigs, while Fun Shapes involves more advanced gestures such as single-finger drag-and-drop, and two-finger rotation.

The first author is part of both Monash Engineering and Monash Conceptual Playlab, so a partnership was created with Monash Engineering final year undergraduate students. The researchers provided the game ideas, puzzle banks and feedback, and coding was done by the students as part of their Engineering final year project. The students were given artistic freedoms to design their games.

5 Practice Developing Research Approach

Once the games have been developed, the next step is encouraging families to use them for creating a new digital activity setting in their home setting which offers new motivating conditions for spatial concept learning.

5.1 Instruction and Information for Parents

To make it easy for families, all but one game was pre-installed on a 10-inch touch screen Android tablet, which was provided to each participating family. Each game comes with a set of instructions on how to play. In addition, information about spatial reasoning skills and how playing with each of the game can help develop children’s spatial skills was also provided as a menu item in each game. The tablet was provided to the families as part of a package of spatial resources that also contained children’s picture books with spatial content and physical resources that the researchers developed or curated.

5.2 Interaction with Families During Observation Sessions

For in-person home visits, two researchers were present, each holding a digital video camera. The first researcher’s primary purpose was to interact with and observe the family, while the second researcher’s primary purpose was to record clear visual and audio footage to be used for data analysis. The first researcher’s camera recording was used only as a backup, in case the other camera failed. For sessions over Zoom, only one researcher was present to interact with and observe the family, with the session recorded using Zoom’s recording function. Prior to the first session, the researcher would meet with the family over Zoom to set up the foundations of educational experiment and develop collaboration with families.

Each session was loosely structured and the researcher’s positioning varying between an active participant and an active observer. At the start of each session, the researcher always chatted to the children about their interests and what was happening in their lives, as well as follow up on anything special that was mentioned at a previous session. Activities were sometimes initiated by the researcher, and other times by the children or the parent. Children were encouraged and allowed to play the games for as long as they stayed enthusiastic. The researcher and parents worked closely together to change activities once the child(ren) lost interest or became tired. For each of the games, the researcher provided quick instructions on how to play and then generally observed and let parents guide the play; sometimes the researcher interjected to ask questions e.g. ‘Why can’t you see the cow’s tail in a front on view?’, offer hints and tips, or praise the children. Each session was nominally 90 minutes in length, but was sometimes ended early if we sensed that the children were tired or hungry, or we would go for longer, if there was a lot of interest and momentum.

6 Data from Video Observation

This vignette recorded with Ivy (almost 7) and Adam (just turned 4) are playing the game Fun Shapes with Mum. This segment of data is from the last of the four observation sessions with the family over Zoom. The utterances are colour-coded for ease of reading, and spatial words and actions are bolded to highlight when spatial language or action is used during game play. Children and mother are in Farm World and are now up to a picture of a barn and it is Adam’s turn. A pink square, the anchor shape has been put in place by the game setting to start off (Fig. 14.1).

Fig. 14.1
A photo of a phone screen. It has the Fun Shapes interface with a barn on the right and 2 squares on the left. A child's hand is in partial view as it touches one of the squares on the screen.

Ivy (almost 7) and Adam (4) putting together geometric shapes to make a barn, in Fun Shapes, with mum’s help

Full size image

Adam has picked up a trapezium, which forms part of the side of the barn, and it seems he is thinking about where to put it. Ivy helps by pointing to the right side of the square and says, “Maybe it might go around there… yeah it goes around there.” Adam moves the shape to that space. Mum tells him, “It might need to be twisted a bit.” Ivy puts her hands on the shape to help Adam rotate it, then tells him to “drag it down”. The shape has not been rotated to the right orientation and does not snap into place. Mum then points to the picture at the top and asks, “look at this one, which side is the longer side?” Upon hearing that, Ivy rotates the trapezium a bit more, and mum tells her, “try twisting it a bit more, that side is not the right length, is it?” Ivy rotates it some more and the shape now snaps into the correct position.

Mum asks Adam, “now where does that pink triangle go?” He accidently picks up the big red rectangle instead, so Ivy chuckles and tells Adam to “take that one down”. He says, “no, it’s a door”, to which Ivy replies, “no, it’s too big for a door”. Mum agrees with Ivy and asks him, “What’s that colour?”, and Adam says “red”. The door is more of a dark pink, rather than red. Ivy points to the side of the roof in the model picture and says, “So it goes up here”, then she uses her finger to trace a triangle on the space above the big pink square and repeats, “up here”. Adam protests, “That’s the right side though.” Ivy reaches over and start rotating the red rectangle so it matches the one in the model picture at the top and says, “Put it up here. Put it up here.” Adam is still not convinced. Mum intervenes and tells them, “it would be difficult to put it there until you put that triangle there first.” So Adam drops the rectangle back down and Ivy drags the pink triangle up to its position.

Ivy then uses her finger to trace a rotated rectangle in the space to the right of the triangle, saying “that one goes here”. Adam drags the rectangle up and starts rotating the shape. Ivy says “maybe you have to turn it a little bit”, and starts to try to help him, but he has rotated the shape to correct to right orientation and it snaps into place. Mum says triumphantly, “Got it!”

Adam now put the little triangle in, saying “Turn it” as he does so. Ivy tells him he doesn’t need to turn it. Adam gets it in, nevertheless. Finally, he puts the little rectangle in where the door goes, while Ivy sings a tune.

7 Discussion

Hedegaard (2002) defines motives as “the goals that come to characterise a person’s actions in different activities over a longer period of time” (p. 55) and describes three types of motives—dominant, meaning-giving, and stimulating motives. Motives are historically and culturally developed throughout a person’s life. Children acquire motives and competencies through cultural interactions with adults and more competent peers within social institutions, such as the home, the community, or school, and how they respond in those interactions (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005).

Children’s development can be conceptualised as changes in their dominant motives—the most important motives that outweigh other motives, and are associated with key activities in their lives. For example, the preschool child’s dominant motive may be play, and the young school child’s dominant motive may be learning. This dominant motive influences how a child may orient themselves in different activity settings (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005). The dominant motive is a meaning-giving motive, however, when a child participates in an activity, they may have a number of other meaning-giving motives. It is a child’s changing hierarchical organisation of their motives that reflects their individuality and development over time. An activity becomes motivating “if it relates to a person’s motives” (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005, p. 64). A dominant motive can be drawn on as a stimulating motive for activities which may not initially be motivating (Hedegaard, 2002), resulting in them becoming personally meaningful and motivating. Everyday family practices and moments can be appropriated into stimulating motive, therefore a motive orientation for spatial learning can start at home under motivating conditions.

For the children in the vignette, play is their central activity at home and their dominant motive. When introducing them to the app, meaning making is achieved by including stories and having the play materials both novel and within the children’s interests. Playing an app on a tablet is quite novel for these children as their family practices do not include a lot of screen time. They are, however, familiar with animals, and they relate well to farm things, to reading picture books, to the concept of keeping warm when it is cold. When the parents and the children use the apps, they create quite playful conditions for themselves. The children help each other and take turns with the puzzles, with the mother sitting with them and being actively involved, asking questions and making suggestions. The children enjoy the apps and engage with the pictures and they feel happy when they complete a puzzle and they keep going through puzzle after puzzle. The act of completing the puzzles necessitates the use of a lot of spatial language. Collectively, the families become more conscious of spatial language and concepts. Playing with the apps help make more concrete the spatial concepts of rotation, size, shape and preposition. The app helped to amplify and complement picture books and other physical resources, providing motivating conditions and contribute to children developing a motive orientation for spatial learning in the home.

8 Conclusion

The digital apps we built during the pandemic are simple and have plenty of room for improvement but they show clear direction in terms of capacity these new digital tools offer us to work with families. However, the methodological point worth highlighting is that the families became part of these developments as they were considered collaborator in developing a new pedagogic space for their children’s spatial thinking capacities. The technical innovations supported by Monash Engineering Faculty were brought together alongside the design of Conceptual PlayWorld to create a new spatial learning opportunity that was fun and engaging for children. Central to this design was the effort to amplify children’s play. Even though these games can be played solo but our effort was to engage the family so that adults have an opportunity to extend and offer new pedagogical insight to children. During each play session, a lot of social interactions occurred especially around the solving the problem that demanded use of spatial language. As discussed in the previous section the families become collectively more aware and conscious of the spatial concepts of rotation, preposition, dimensions, and shapes. Thus, the digital apps we created seem to create new developmental conditions for spatial learning in the home setting. They complement and amplify concrete materials, and could potentially be used in place of concrete materials where they are not available, hard to access, or too costly. This we imagine would help to narrow the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced families. Educational technology is constantly evolving, with digital tools allowing families create new possibilities for their children, and so research methodologies and materials should also evolve. These apps helped in building common knowledge (Edwards, 2011; Rai, 2019) that was used by the researcher to develop a relational proximity with the families who were finding it difficult to support their children’s learning during the pandemic.