This study investigates the integration of spatial thinking into early childhood education through story-driven design activities and the use of a Lesson Study approach. Conducted in six Irish junior and senior infant classrooms across two schools with ten teachers, this research aimed to address the following research question: How can the Lesson Study approach support early childhood teachers in deepening their knowledge of their pupils, changing teaching practices, and impacting teacher self-efficacy, particularly in relation to spatial reasoning during story-based design activities? Qualitative data from classroom observations and teacher discussions indicate that teachers adapted their lesson strategies based on deeper insights into their students' spatial thinking. They improved the development of spatial design assignments and demonstrated enhanced self-efficacy in conducting spatialized design lessons. Lesson Study dynamics enhance teacher awareness related to design and technology projects, foster creative task identification, and challenge teacher perceptions. Our findings suggest that the Lesson Study processes implemented in this study could motivate teachers to integrate spatial thinking into their classrooms while still adhering to their curriculum. This approach effectively integrates spatial thinking into the curriculum, providing authentic design scenarios for pupils to develop spatial reasoning. These outcomes underscore the potential of Lesson Study for teacher professional development in early childhood spatial and design education.

Developing creative solutions to improve our surroundings is a key 21st-century competency. Design & Technology (D&T) education presents valuable opportunities to teach creativity as a skill. However, the ill-defined and context-dependent nature of design problems often makes it challenging for educators to adequately evaluate the creativity demonstrated in pupils’ solutions. Comparative judgment, which does not rely on a predetermined set of evaluative criteria, offers an alternative approach. In this study, we leveraged this method to investigate how 20 industrial design students, acting as judges, holistically assessed design ideas and prototypes produced by 201 pupils aged 10 to 14 in the Netherlands. Although creativity is acknowledged as central to design quality, it is not prioritized in many current D&T projects. To address this gap, we deliberately focused on evaluating the creativity evident in pupils’ designs. We further explored how judges’ evaluative considerations, coded as criteria, shifted from the beginning to the end of the comparative judgment process. Our findings from qualitative and quantitative analyses added to our understanding of the multifaceted process of evaluating creativity and provided practical insights into using comparative judgment as an assessment tool in design education.

Spatial thinking is ubiquitous in design. Design education across all age groups encompasses a range of spatially challenging activities, such as forming and modifying mental representations of ideas, and visualizing the scenarios of design prototypes being used. While extensive research has examined the cognitive processes of spatial thinking and their relationships to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning, there remains a knowledge gap regarding the specific spatial thinking processes needed for open-ended problems, which may differ from those assessed in close-ended, analytical spatial tasks. To address this gap, we used educational design-based research to develop a nature-inspired, design-by-analogy project and investigate the spatial thinking processes of young, novice designers. 16 children from an international school in the Netherlands participated in this five-week design project. Multimodal evidence from classroom recordings and children’s design works were triangulated to offer insight into the key spatial thinking processes involved in their creation of nature-inspired, analogy-based design prototypes. Our results revealed spatial thinking processes that might not align with those assessed in conventional spatial tests and may be unique to design or open-ended problem-solving. These processes include abstracting spatial features to infer form-function relationships, retrieving a range of relevant visual information from memory, developing multiple possible analogical matches based on spatial features and relationships, elaborating and iterating on the design concepts and representations to make creative and suitable solutions for the design challenge, as well as visualizing design prototypes in practical usage scenarios. By highlighting the nuanced differences between spatial thinking in open-ended, divergent thinking tasks and conventional spatial tasks that demand single correct solutions, our research contributes to a deeper understanding of how children utilize spatial thinking in design and open-ended problem-solving contexts. Furthermore, this case study offers practical implications for scaffolding children's analogical reasoning and nurturing their spatial thinking in design education.

Developing spatial ability in early childhood is crucial, but not all children are naturally drawn to spatial activities like construction. For those with different play preferences, integrating design and construction tasks with storybooks will engage them more, tapping into their problem-solving interests. Despite the central role of storytelling in early childhood education, it’s relatively new for teachers to use stories to engage children in spatialized design assignments. This study addresses this gap by implementing a Lesson Study approach in six Irish junior and senior infant classrooms from two schools with ten teachers. Qualitative data from classrooms and teacher discussions reveal positive outcomes: teachers altered their lesson strategies, gained insights into their students’ spatial thinking, improved spatial design assignment development, and enhanced selfefficacy in conducting spatialized lessons. These outcomes underscore the efficacy of Lesson Study for professional development in early childhood spatial education.

Extensive research has established that spatial ability is a crucial factor for achieving success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). However, challenges that educators encounter while teaching spatial skills remain uncertain. The purpose of this study is to develop a research framework that examines the interrelationships, barriers, and enablers amongst various educational components, including schools, teachers, students, classrooms, and training programs, that are encountered when teaching for spatial ability development. A thorough examination of international research, in combination with a detailed review of the primary Science and Mathematics curricula in Ireland, Latvia, Sweden, and the Netherlands, is undertaken to acquire a more concentrated comprehension of the incorporation of spatial components in the curriculum. The review seeks to establish the fundamental factors that enable or hinder teachers in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, pedagogical content knowledge, and spatialized classroom practices.

Spatial ability is malleable and belongs in the preschool. For preschoolers, many analytical activities with one correct answer such as tangram have been developed. Less is known about employing open-ended design assignments to creatively practice spatial thinking. Little attention has been paid to the mutual qualitative differences between children when engaged in spatial thinking and insight in children’s motivation is lacking. As design and play have much in common, our first study investigated play orientations during free play of 49 Dutch preschoolers during free play in a low and a high SES school. Participative interviews and observations in the construction and home corners of two schools uncovered different play orientations– construction and pretend play - and either a focus on open-ended objects or on defined objects. In a subsequent study, the influence of these play and object orientations on how children design was investigated. This study with 13 children also used generative design research methods grounded in ethnographic research and therapeutic practices. Using an empathic, story-based, open-ended design challenge, results showed that play-orientations of children influence the length and nature of the design activities as well as the design outcomes. Children with a pretend-play orientation are longer engaged and talk more about the character involved. They usually built organic structures with a variety of objects, while construction-oriented children mainly built sturdy and geometrical structures and mainly used open-ended objects. In all play orientations, spatial thinking was practiced and children were spatially challenged. For example, in all orientations difficulties arose around getting the character in out the structure, however, as different structures were build, the nature of these difficulties were also different. Open-ended design activities that contain characters and problems children can empathize with are a valuable addition to the palette of activities to develop spatial thinking in early classrooms. Our study shows that design activities stimulate children to practice spatial thinking in a creative context and have the ability to engage children with a pretend-play orientation who are otherwise less engaged in construction. The play-orientations and object-orientations are informative for research and the development of spatial educational interventions aiming at a diversity of learners.

Encoding intangible data variables with visual, spatial, and physical properties demands a high level of spatial reasoning. The ability to reason spatially is widely deemed critical to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) learning. While much research has explored the relationship between learning with visualizations and spatial skills development, little is known about how children use their spatial reasoning in constructing tangible visualizations. This work-in-progress investigates how data physicalization activities, organized within a Design module in primary classrooms in the Netherlands, provide a window to understanding children’s spatial reasoning about data. Based on preliminary analysis, we identify six indicators of children’s spatial reasoning as observed in their constructing processes and artifacts. Most children in the study used tangible materials of varied sizes, curated meaningful spatial arrangements, and employed different unitizing methods to encode numerical data with spatial properties. Some children adjusted the sizes, units, or spatial arrangement to refine their tangible visualizations, considered the pros and cons of two- and three-dimensional forms of presentation, and made creative use of spatial shapes. In summary, this case study offers insights into children’s use of spatial reasoning in data physicalization creation and practical implications for situating data physicalization activities in formal learning environments.

Empirical interdisciplinary research has explored the role of spatial ability in STEM learning and achievement. While most of this research indicates that fostering spatial thinking in educational contexts has the potential to positively impact students’ enrollment and performance in STEM subjects, there is less agreement on the best approach to do so. This article provides an overview of various types of effective spatial interventions and practices in formal or informal educational contexts, including targeted training of STEM-relevant spatial skills, spatialized curricula embedded in schools, integrated STEM practices addressing students’ use of spatial skills, and spatial activities in informal STEM education. Gender and socio-economic status of students – two variables that have been found to moderate the relationship between students’ spatial ability and their STEM performance – are also discussed in this article. Drawing on a wide spectrum of perspectives on situating spatial ability research in STEM education contexts, this article underscores the need for further inquiry into opportunities for developing K-12 students’ spatial ability through integrated and informal STEM practices. This article proposes a conjecture that the relationship between developing students’ spatial ability and enhancing their abilities to solve spatially complex STEM problems is bidirectional. Recommendations for future research are made on lingering questions about the effect of interventions, untapped resources for spatial ability training in formal and informal STEM education, and educational strategies for developing students’ spatial ability in authentic learning environments.

In this chapter we focus on the importance of the human capacity of design capability and how this can be fostered through design and technology education. Historic undervaluing of developing design capability in formal schooling is highlighted and counteracted by identifying recent recognition of embodied cognition and the role design education has to play in developing this. We forefront how learning that holistically links the head, hand and heart can be achieved by engaging learners in design contexts that are meaningful and have resonance with them and illustrate this through a case study of eleven year old learners designing for a public space. We provide background to how understandings of design processes have developed to enable more authentic approaches to design and technology education and how both summative and formative assessment can support these approaches. We place emphasis on pedagogic processes that maintain the authenticity of design processes whilst supporting and nurturing learning. This involves giving learners the skills of working with open and closed projects, how this many vary with the age and experience and how they can develop autonomy whilst also being collaborative and develop empathy. We highlight the importance of helping learners to draw on their own experiences and understand how they can utilise these when designing. Finally we explore how assessment is an important and integral part of pedagogic strategies when developing design capability. We provide a model for formative assessment that can be used directly within design projects based on a resource that actively uses formative assessment to Make Design Learning Visible.

Understanding and effectively using visual representations is important to learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Various techniques to visualize information, such as two- and three-dimensional graphs, diagrams, and models, not only expand our capacity to work with different types of information but also actively recruit our visual–spatial thinking. Data physicalization is emerging as a beginner-friendly approach to construct information visualization. Mapping intangible data onto tangible artifacts that possess visual, spatial, and physical properties demands an interplay of spatial thinking and hands-on manipulation. Much existing literature has explored using formatted infographics to aid learning and spatial thinking development. However, there is limited insight into how children may leverage their spatial thinking to create information visualizations, particularly tangible ones. This case study documented the data physicalization activities organized in two design classrooms of an international school in Netherlands, with 37 children aged 11–12. Seven themes relevant to spatial thinking were identified from multimodal evidence gathered from the data physicalization artifacts, classroom videos and recordings of children’s making process, and semi-structured interviews with children. Our findings suggested that these children generated various ideas to create visual–spatial forms for data with the materials at hand, such as mapping quantities to tangible materials of different sizes, using spatial ordinal arrangement, and unitizing materials to set visual parameters. Meanwhile, they evaluated and adjusted the visual–spatial properties of these materials according to the numerical data they had, crafting feasibility, and others’ spatial perspectives. What was particularly interesting in our findings was children’s iteration on their visual–spatial understandings of the intangible numerical values and the tangible materials throughout the embodied making processes. Overall, this study illustrated the different types of spatial thinking children applied to create their data physicalizations and offered insights into how embodied experiences accompanying the open-ended visualization challenge allowed children to explore and construct spatial understandings.

Spatial thinking is embedded in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) learning. Design and Technology education inherently encompasses a wide range of spatial activities, such as mentally transforming objects and materials to form representations of design ideas, visually communicating ideas, and creating 2D and 3D design artifacts. Among different design topics, biomimicry offers a unique avenue for pupils to recognize and analyze forms and structures in nature. Mapping out the analogical links between nature’s strategies to design strategies, pupils can potentially exercise their spatial thinking while gaining inspiration to solve human design challenges. This study is one of the first to highlight opportunities for supporting primary school pupils’ spatial thinking through a biomimicry design project. Embracing the methodology of educational design-based research, we tested out and iterated on this design project with teacher’s input and authentic classroom feedback. Data are gathered from sixteen 11- to 12-year-olds at an international school in the Netherlands. Classroom videos and audios, pupils’ notes, 2D and 3D design artifacts, formative assessment, semi-structured interviews with pupils, and the pre- and post-project spatial test triangulate evidence for pupils' spatial thinking in this project. This case study contributes to the growing theories of integrating spatial training in primary curriculums and offers empirically-grounded suggestions for the design and cultivation of future spatialized learning ecologies.

This paper reports on a pilot project focused on the use of the formative assessment resource Make Design Learning Visible (MDLV) in different national settings. The MDLV resource centers on a design model involving seven interactive design skills and a formative assessment model involving five strategies. A team of researchers from seven countries in three continents, are working collaboratively with a teacher practitioner from each country to develop the structure of the research project and trial of a design activity that utilises the MDLV skills and approach to formative assessment. This paper reports on ongoing exploratory early work with the teacher practitioners trialing a short design project with an overarching theme of sustainability, a focus on developing two design skills (Empathy and Sharing ideas) and two formative assessment strategies (‘Activating learners as resources for one another’ and ‘Activating learners as owners of their learning’). The project centers on a design brief customised for each national setting and relevant for learners aged between 10 and 15 years of age. A structured portfolio supporting an iterative design process forms the basis of tangible evidence of learner responses. The pilot is providing insights into the effectiveness of the MDLV resource in developing design skills and formative assessment across national settings. Additionally, the pilot contributes understandings of comparative participatory research involving teacher practitioners across countries. The exploratory nature of the early stages of the project intentionally allows some aspects to be customised locally by teachers as we seek to understand rather than dictate how the resource is best used in the local educational contexts. To this end, the overarching structure and pedagogy of the activity is fixed, but aspects such as lesson timings, choices around the use of MDLV tools and the further MDLV design skills are flexible.

The Your Turn guidebook is a step-by-step instruction for teachers (in training) to create and implement their own design projects for upper primary and lower secondary education. It provides an overview of the variety of tools for Co-design projects with children, a step-by-step guidance, advice on the approach and striking examples. Performing these kind of projects, students gain experience with designing around appealing themes from their daily life.The guidebook is based on the results of the research project Co-design with Kids, funded by Dutch research organizations NRO and NWO. In this project researchers from Delft University of Technology and a large consortium of scientific and public partners have collaborated with teachers and pupils. This guide provides support for building co-design processes that benefit both designers and the participants

In ‘Your Turn voor de leerkracht’ staan voor stap- voor stap instructies waarmee leerkrachten (in opleiding) een ontwerpproject over een eigen thema kunnen opzetten en uitvoeren voor de bovenbouw primair onderwijs en onderbouw voortgezet onderwijs. Hiermee doen leerlingen
ervaring op met ontwerpen rond aansprekende thema’s uit de eigen leeromgeving. Gebaseerd op recent wetenschappelijk onderzoek, bevat de handleiding een rijkdom aan mogelijkheden voor real-life ontwerpend leren. Met Your Turn heeft de leerkracht tal van werkvormen in handen om creativiteit, communicatie en empathie te bevorderen, bijvoorbeeld omgekeerd brainstormen, werken met persona’s, kiezen met een keuzekruis of het maken van een videostrip. De handleiding geeft concrete aanwijzingen om het niveau van ontwerpend leren te verhogen. Het bouwt voort op een serie toegepaste lespakketten ‘Your Turn – aan de slag als echte ontwerpers’, zie de achterflap.

Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on the construction and utilization of a design feedback intervention during a real-life design project with a group of primary school children (aged 8–12). The goal of the intervention was to stimulate young novice designers’ creative thinking by guiding the design feedback dialogues with their peers and clients. The intervention was designed according to the following key principles: (1) guide towards a shared understanding of the design through low-level convergent feedback, (2) stimulate critical reflection and evaluation of the design to help identify and internalize possible shortcomings through high-level convergent feedback, and (3) provide a way to move forward by guiding new generative thoughts through high-level divergent feedback. Overall, the results show that the intervention can support young novice designers, their peers, and clients in engaging in constructive feedback dialogues, thereby stimulating their creative thinking. Our main contribution entails a detailed understanding of the successes and obstacles within the feedback dialogues, as guided by the intervention. Based on these results, we propose a set of refined design principles to inform feedback interventions. With this research we hope to give insight in the complexity of design feedback dialogues, while also inspiring design educators to actively try out these key principles.

Het lespakket ‘Presenteer je gymidee’ is onderdeel van de nieuwe serie ontwerplessen ‘Your Turn – aan de slag als echte ontwerpers’ voor de bovenbouw primair onderwijs en onderbouw voortgezet onderwijs. Gebaseerd op recent wetenschappelijk onderzoek, bevat de handleiding een rijkdom aan mogelijkheden voor ontwerpend leren. Met Your Turn heeft de leerkracht een kant-en-klaar pakket in handen om creativiteit, communicatie en empathie te bevorderen. Hiermee doen leerlingen ervaring op met ontwerpen rond aansprekende thema’s uit de eigen leeromgeving. Elke handleiding bevat een aantal nieuwe werkvormen voor ontwerpend leren, bijvoorbeeld de omgekeerde brainstorm, puzzelen met ontwerppresentaties en het maken van een oplossingsverhaal.

Het lespakket ‘Gymmen in de Toekomst’ is onderdeel van de nieuwe serie ontwerplessen ‘Your Turn – aan de slag als echte ontwerpers’ voor de bovenbouw primair onderwijs en onderbouw voortgezet onderwijs. Gebaseerd op recent wetenschappelijk onderzoek, bevat de handleiding een rijkdom aan mogelijkheden voor ontwerpend leren. Met Your Turn
heeft de leerkracht een kant-en-klaar pakket in handen om creativiteit, communicatie en empathie te bevorderen. Hiermee doen leerlingen ervaring op met ontwerpen rond aansprekende thema’s uit de eigen leeromgeving. Elke handleiding bevat een aantal nieuwe werkvormen voor ontwerpend leren, bijvoorbeeld de omgevingsvlog, brainstormen
met plaatjes, kiezen met een keuzekruis en het geven van feedback die inspireert.

Het lespakket ‘Zenna in het ziekenhuis’ is onderdeel van de nieuwe serie ontwerplessen ‘Your Turn – aan de slag als echte ontwerpers’ voor de bovenbouw primair onderwijs en onderbouw voortgezet onderwijs. Gebaseerd op recent wetenschappelijk onderzoek, bevat de handleiding een rijkdom aan mogelijkheden voor ontwerpend leren. Met Your Turn heeft de leerkracht een kant-en-klaar pakket in handen om creativiteit, communicatie en empathie te bevorderen. Hiermee doen leerlingen ervaring op met ontwerpen rond aansprekende thema’s uit de eigen leeromgeving. Elke handleiding bevat een aantal nieuwe werkvormen voor ontwerpend leren, bijvoorbeeld gebruiken van verhalen, brainstormen met plaatjes, kiezen met een keuzekruis en het maken van een videostrip.

During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work and a sign of pupil’s creative thinking. To find ways to achieve engagement, we can look to the Montessori tradition. Due to the fact that learning is regarded as feeding insight through experimenting, tasks have to offer pupils the opportunity to gain knowledge about isolated details of the learning situation. This is realised by brief, simple and objective tasks combined with liberty to approach the hands-on work in one’s own way. Applied to Design and Technology, we can define brief, simple and objective tasks with a focus on a technique as an isolated detail of the learning situation. Offering liberty during hands-on work enables creative thinking. The deployment of well-defined tasks with a focus on a technique is possible by dividing a complex assignment into a collection of brief tasks with single problems and working towards single objectives in the topic, making use of a single technique. Such a collection is a format that has the potential to enable ongoing engagement. This case-study researches the actual effect of a stepwise organised collection of tasks on the design performance of pupils of nine to twelve years old. The results show that the tasks turned out to be useful in initiating engagement. In combination with joint presentations, ongoing engagement was achieved resulting in well-considered designs and products. In addition, dialogue with disengaged pupils delivered solutions towards engagement. As a side-effect of dialogue the teacher-pupil relationships and the pupil-pupil relationships improved.