Collaborative Research: Using AI-enabled Smart Blocks to Understand and Support Spatial Reasoning and Learning

The goal of this project is to develop a framework for monitoring and characterizing human spatial reasoning via a radically new way of measuring interactions between human and objects with agency. Spatial reasoning deals with tasks involving thinking and manipulating objects in three dimensions. It is now well-established, for example, that spatial ability predicts STEM achievement and attainment and creativity in science even across decades. The vision of this proposal is to develop a cyber-human system and a computational framework which can be applied to understanding of spatial reasoning in children. The overall objective is to develop a smart object system, which will be able to: (i) collect data on children handling of objects in day-to-day natural ambience, and that is in an energy-efficient way to make it practical; (ii) develop computational models for inferring the spatial cognition dynamics behind children-object interactions.