Over the past decade the market for children’s digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for formal STEM learning. However, one criticism of the digital play market generally and of STEM play specifically is that these play experiences are not always designed in ways that are cognitively engaging. Therefore, the goal of the three papers presented in Chapters 2-4 of this dissertation were to reveal design characteristics of digital STEM play experiences that foster different types of STEM relevant cognitive engagement. We focused on two types of design characteristics, the affordances of the digital medium and the specificity of the provided play goals. We also focused on two specific cognitive skills, spatial skills and exploratory behaviors, or the actions children take on the world to generate new information. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 addressed the association between children’s spatial skills and how they played with three children’s apps featuring spatial activities that varied in their affordances and goals. Chapter 2 showed that children’s spatial skills were associated with their play with spatial apps that challenged children to complete highly specified goals. However, Chapter 3 showed that despite unique spatial affordances of the digital medium, children’s spatial skills were not associated with their play with an app that featured an entirely open-ended spatial activity. Given the effect of goals found across Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 aimed to formally address the effect of play goal specificity on cognitive engagement in digital STEM play. Consequently, Chapter 4 examined the influence of different goals on families’ exploratory behaviors during play with an app-controlled robot and showed that more open-ended goals engendered more exploration. Taken together, the papers presented through Chapters 2-4 in this bundled dissertation provide insight for researchers, caregivers, and designers on how design characteristics of digital STEM play experiences can be leveraged to support different kinds of cognitive engagement that could be important for children’s formal STEM learning.

Creator

• Polinsky, Naomi

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3c16-de20

Subject

• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16461
• etdadmin_upload_975492

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright