The construction of spatial awareness in early childhood: the effect of an educational scenario-based programming environment

Abstract

A teaching intervention – educational scenario – was implemented by educators to 306 pre-schoolers in 17 classrooms. It was designed to foster children’s spatial awareness so as to help them construct a model of spatial concepts with reference to a mobile object around the space, the programmable toy Bee-Bot. The educational scenario encompasses instruments designed for gathering data of the pre and post children’s representations about direction and orientation concepts, the teaching activities conceived to deliver these concepts by using the programmable toy and finally instruments designed for evaluation. The evaluation took place after three weeks implementation and the results indicated statistically significant difference in children’s pre and post-test intervention representations and consequently construction of spatial knowledge not only to a functional context but moreover to a more symbolic one.