Many thanks to my all mentors for this memorable experience from undergrad @JohnsHopkins

... They also highlight the potential for early STEM education through play🎈

5/ 🔍 Conclusion

Our findings show how children’s build paths are strikingly similar to adults, prioritizing stability and efficiency 🧠 and offer new insights into how children build efficiently and accurately, reflecting children’s "computational mind" 🎓🌼 ...

4/ 📈 Development

Despite the seemingly simple construction task, children demonstrate sophisticated planning and spatial reasoning from age 4, although they produce fewer errors and more efficient builds as they get older.

(Average proportion of states consistent with a layering approach and mean state accuracy for each model. Error bars indicate standard deviation.)

3/ 🧩 Stability

In addition to this highly constrained building pattern, 4- to 8-year-old children use a layer-by-layer principle in their building. Such a systematic approach results in more stable and accurate structures.

(Colored images are the states that were actually built by builders, and gray images are correct but unattested states. Arrows represent transition between states, labeled with the number of participants who followed the path)

2/ 💡 Selectivity

To assemble even a simple 4-block structure, there are many possible states one can construct, leading to a large number of possible construction paths. However, 4- to 8-year-old children are highly selective in their building sequences.

1/ 🧑‍💻 Coding

We developed novel analytic methods to capture the nuance in children's block building: each action they take and how the blocks are connected, laying out the entire construction path.

Now available at Cognitive Development: doi.org/10.1016/j.co...