• Exploring the puzzle space: manipulating pieces offloads part of mental visualization to physical action.

[ 4] Dourish, P. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

of design of children’s technologies. Conversely, a lack of understanding of the importance of embodiment can lead only to an impoverished view since it ignores the way children (and all humans) create meaning through action.

[ 5] Clark, A. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

March + April 2009

[ 6] Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago Press, 1980.

Foundations: Embodied Cognition

A number of books have appeared that detail this shift in thinking about cognition. Three in particular are highly relevant for the HCI and design communities: Where the Action Is, by Paul Dourish [ 4], Being There, by Andy Clark [ 5], and Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [ 6]. Taken together, these works present some important concepts that are particularly relevant for designers of children’s interactive technologies.

In general, the embodied cognitive processes of children mirror those of adults. However, the development of such processes depends on children’s specific and age-related physical characteristics, their inherited abilities, and their practical activities played out in a physical and social environment. The following ideas from embodied cognition are important in understanding how cognitive development in children depends on their interactions with the world.

Exploiting external scaffolding: restructuring the
spatial environment. The first idea of importance

relates to how children develop knowledge by exploiting external scaffolding or spatial properties of the environment. Meaning is created through restructuring the spatial configuration of elements in the environment. A highly structured environment does not provide opportunities for restructuring and thus limits knowledge construction. What is required is an environment, either computational or otherwise, that supports multiple spatial configurations. For example, a child may have a nascent understanding of division. When asked to share a bag of candy, the child may restructure their environment by organizing piles of candies into various groups until a satisfactory solution is reached. Through restructuring the spatial configurations of objects, her mind, action, and the environment work in tandem. She not only solves the problem at hand but also better understands the concept of division. Her experiences with spatial structure later give meaning to the symbolic representations used in arithmetic. Children develop new understandings of many phenomena in this way. In doing so, they can test hypotheses, generate new states of information, and actively construct new knowledge in the world by manipulating its spatial properties.

Exploiting physical activity: cognition and action
working together. The second idea of importance