The preschoolers were fascinated, looking at their classroom through the lens of an iPad camera, watching animated images pop up as a cheerful voice told them: Feed apples to a pig behind a haystack. Select the carnival ride located between two sets of balloons.
While the game delighted these 3- and 4-year-olds, they were actually participating in a serious research project that is developing an important foundation for their future in math — spatial thinking and its integrated vocabulary, a skill typically overlooked in early education.
The students used augmented reality scenes, testing the app on the iPad, to understand an object’s position in relation to other objects. With feedback from teachers such as Chelsea Attride in New York, the research was conducted by the nonprofit Education Development Center in partnership with Boston radio station WGBH Education Foundation and education nonprofit Digital Promise.
“That was the really new part of what we were doing,” said Ashley Lewis Presser, senior research scientist at the Education Development Center. “We were able to create these spatial tasks that kids would do that were really fun and engaging.”
There is limited curriculum available about spatial thinking for preschool children, despite its importance in building later success in STEM learning, said Regan Vidiksis, a senior research associate with the center.
“This was always a subject that I struggled teaching to my students in school because when you think of math, you focus on maybe shapes, maybe simple numeral identification,” said Attride, who has since moved to teaching high school. “Spatial awareness is always bottom of the totem pole.”
The project, which includes eight weeks of curriculum, allows children to learn skills interactively through a combination of collaborative digital games, read-alouds and hands-on activities. A character named Gracie, for example, guides kids interactively through mazes and maps displayed either on the tablet or in the classroom.
“We’re integrating with books that are being read at home and in the school, and a lot of physical movement,” Lewis Presser said. “So it’s not like sitting there staring at a map. It’s really engaging with something that children would naturally tend to gravitate toward at this age.”
That was beneficial to preschool teacher Jill Arrell in Massachusetts. Previously, she had integrated spatial vocabulary casually into classroom by reminding children to put a basket “on” a shelf or to put their hands “behind” their back.
Since starting to use the curriculum two years ago, she has found that preschool students enjoy following maps. They love going “into” the sandbox, “around” the tree and “behind” the chair as they’ve headed out on missions, she said. She’s modified lessons of her own, creating treasure maps of the classroom and playground.
“We would hide a stuffed animal, and then I would kind of give them hints, like, ‘It’s between the stove and the refrigerator,’” Arrell said.
It wasn’t easy to figure out how to translate augmented reality lessons to a preschool audience, Lewis Presser said. The team had to find simple ways for kids to complete tasks, parsing through challenges such as avoiding a need for the kids to tap the screen at moments when they might be holding the tablet with both hands.
To evaluate the effectiveness of the new curriculum, the team of researchers recruited 16 preschool classrooms and adjusted the activities based on feedback. Arrell, for example, found some aspects of the games too complicated for her students, particularly mazes and maps that included obstacles to navigate.
Ultimately, the researchers have found the right balance.
“I feel like it provided a nice foundation for future work, future development in this area — especially with young kids — because it provides a lot of different opportunities, novel opportunities that are kind of untapped,” Vidiksis said.
The aim, Lewis Presser said, was for the curriculum to be adaptable, so that teachers such as Arrell and Attride could spread out and repeat lessons as necessary.
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
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