Designing with and for preschoolers: A method to observe tangible interactions with spatial manipulatives

To date, the developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account in the early stages of interaction design. This paper addresses this gap in the research by exploring how children between the ages of 26 and 43 months interact with spatial manipulatives. To this end, we modified intervention techniques for early spatial learning found in cognitive developmental studies and combined these with design methods used in Child-Tangible Interaction (CTI). From the former we borrowed the Preschool Embedded Figures Test (PEFT), and from the latter a storytelling approach incorporated into structured tasks with hands-on tools. In this paper, we first discuss related work on early spatial learning and CTI methods. Then, we describe a case study conducted with 14 parent-child dyads. Finally, we present the results, which offer insight into young children’s mental rotation skills, different rotation action strategies and parental input requirements. Our findings contribute to design methods to elicit age specific knowledge about young children’s hands-on learning, and set forth techniques and design considerations for evidence-based CTI to scaffold early spatial thinking skills.