How a child's thinking develops
The peak of active formation of the human brain occurs in the period before
The thought processes of a newborn baby are notdeveloped. Their appearance is inextricably linked with various practical activities. In its elementary form, thinking is formed towards the end of the first year of life. The most important conditions for this are purposeful training and education. Solving interesting life tasks, the child learns the essence of things and phenomena, learns to understand the reasons and patterns of their connection.
Psychologists distinguish four stages of thinking formation:
- visual and effective (1-3 years);
- visual-figurative (3-5 years);
- verbal and logical (5-7 years);
- abstract logical (from 7 years old).
All four species are closely related and should be equally developed in a child.
The baby's predisposition to hobbies, histalents are determined by a set of genes and are passed on from parents, and their development and compensation for the absence of innate ones already depend on the experience that a person receives in childhood. The way a child thinks is influenced by the leading style of thinking, which is also inherent in everyone from birth. It determines the level of development of empathy, love for music or art, the ability to non-verbally read the emotional state of others. Experts identify five main types of thinking:
- Empirical is a cumulative set of skills that allow you to perceive information from the outside world.
- Engineering - associated with the ability to set technical and design tasks and see the shortest way to solve them.
- Creative - a person's ability to transfer data from the neural network of the brain to the outside world. Thanks to him, a person masters the skills of self-expression.
- Philosophical - aimed at understanding the world and understanding the human being. This style is at the heart of any analytics.
- Scientific - a way of knowing the world through testing your hypotheses.
Any of the named styles may prevail inchild, but this does not mean that you cannot develop the rest. Childhood is the period of the most intensive development of mental activity. If you do not spend energy on education at this age, then in later years it will be much more difficult to catch up.
Why do kids need apps
Modern children are very different from previous ones.generations: they were born in the era of information technology and actively use digital devices. By the age of two, 90% of them have minimal skills in using gadgets. 42% of Russian preschoolers aged 3–6 already have their own tablet or smartphone, while 10% of children spend more than three hours behind the screen. Today children have great independence in the choice of content to watch. They mainly use mobile devices for games, learning, watching cartoons and videos. Moreover, games have become the most popular leisure activity for every second child under the age of 12 (45%). We, adults, cannot stop this process. However, it is in our power to influence the quality of mobile products that fall into the hands of the younger generation.
Research has shown that education andThe versatile development of children is a priority value for Russian mothers. In just a couple of generations, parents have significantly increased the amount of time, attention and money they invest in parenting. According to the New York Times, mothers who work outside the home spend the same amount of time caring for their children as stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s. One of the trends that is actively gaining popularity is edutainment - learning through entertainment.
The scope of the edutainment is wide: from creative workshops to interactive games. Since gadgets are in great demand among the younger generation, parents have a reasonable question - how to choose a suitable educational product?
Purchasing a mobile app is essentially nothingis no different than buying a book or toy. In all cases, the correct content will have a positive impact on the child, contribute to his learning and development. Parents need to not only keep track of the time spent on the screen of the gadget, but also carefully approach the process of choosing the appropriate educational application.
A caring parent will never buy a childa toy that emits a nasty squeak or an unnatural moo. He certainly won't take a book with scary illustrations and meaningless text from the counter. And, of course, he will not buy a mobile game with low quality graphics, content and music. Creating the Skazbook application, we focused on professional voice acting, symphonic music of the British orchestra, Leonardo da Vinci's fairy tales and very high-quality graphics, because the formation of the right taste in a child is one of the primary tasks of parents. After all, if a person in childhood is faced with high-quality content, then in the future he will try to surround himself with it.
How to choose a good learning app for your child
Introduce the child to the world of music, existingtools can be done using the educational game Tiny Orchestra, approved by independent psychologists. Here, the kid not only learns new information for himself, but also reveals his creative potential: he will feel like a conductor by creating his own orchestra. An excellent platform for developing artistic skills can be the MoMA Art Lab app from the New York Museum of Modern Art. And in the NGAkids Art Zone, in addition to interactive training sessions inspired by works from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, there is a digital space for a solo exhibition.
Like any developmental manual, the applicationshould correspond to the child’s age and take into account the leading type of activity at this stage of life. Only in this case can a mobile game become a tool for the development of speech, thinking, logic, attention and other mental processes. This rule is perfectly implemented in the puzzles Thinkrolls: Kings & Queens, where a child learns the complex laws of physics in a familiar playful way, learns to think consistently, be persistent and solve problems.
Game plot underlying the educationalapplications, significantly increases the efficiency of the educational process. Children especially like to learn new things together with their favorite cartoon characters. So, in the "School of Arkady Parovozov" application, a fairytale rescuer teaches preschoolers the basics of safety in everyday life and actions in unforeseen situations. And in "Kids'Corner - fairy tales for children" in general, several dozen cartoon characters are collected: from fixies to bees. In the educational interactive quest “Learning to read, saving animals”, traveling through 16 levels and rescuing animals from the ice captivity, children learn the basics of reading and expand their vocabulary. In the game Dinosaur Tim, the child must become a superhero and help the main character save the family from the hands of the villains.
Device touch screens allow applications“know” whether the baby is answering accurately, adapting the answers and suggesting next steps for action. In theory, this could increase educational potential. The right application should be designed so that the child has the opportunity to think and make decisions on his own, and not mindlessly point his fingers at the screen.
How will a parent know that the game is good? If possible, test the game yourself. Pay attention to whether there are any distractions (sounds, details) in it that will interfere with the child's concentration on completing the play task. For the youngest users, games without huge text accompaniment, with a simple, intuitive interface (for example, Puzzle Shapes or "" Drawing! "Drawing for children") are suitable.
Research has shown that 95% of games forpreschoolers contain advertising that, due to their age, children do not distinguish from media content. The game should be safe, not contain elements of aggression and pop-up advertisements, so that the parent can safely leave the child alone with the gadget and go about their business. These nuances have been taken into account in the Math & Logic: By eliminating any possibility of contact with the baby from the outside (the game does not require an Internet connection), the developer ImagiRation LLC has thereby created a completely safe learning environment.
The role of psychologists and educators in the development of children's games
It is important to involve in the creation of children's applications notonly good developers, but also scientists, psychologists, educators, as well as specialists who understand thinking. Many developers believe that mobile products for children can do without good graphics and sound, since a child, due to age, does not see the difference in quality. This is absolutely not the case.
Before creating Skazbuka, we carried out an analysiseducational and entertainment applications available on the market. The findings unpleasantly surprised us: in the vast majority of cases, the interactive product was an inconsistent set of games with low visualization and detail, poor voice quality and primitive melodies. By the way, the developers of the application “Bukovki: learning to read words by syllables for children” solved the problem of voice acting in a non-standard way - they entrusted the choice of voice to their little users, so that they would later be comfortable doing it.
Even the best development team can't do itcreate a high-quality educational application without the participation of educators, neuropsychologists and scientists. As in medicine, in everything related to the education and upbringing of a child, the principle "do no harm" must be observed. Development should not be early or excessive - it should be timely and sufficient. An interactive form of involving children in the educational process through game computer technologies should require coherence and coordination of the information received through various analyzers - conceptual, kinesthetic, visual, auditory and emotional. It is possible to unobtrusively involve a child in the educational process, to get interested in learning from an early age thanks to the "Preschool Education" application. A series of 15 games contains tasks for counting, the development of logic, memory, thinking, the ability to navigate forms and distinguish colors.
A huge plus of a mobile training product -the presence of adapted author's methods so that learning is holistic, consistent with the age characteristics and capabilities of the child, and based on the zone of his proximal development. For example, in the "Math and Logic for Children" application, exercises are automatically adjusted to the child, taking into account his current capabilities. The effectiveness of this adaptive task selection has been confirmed by research. You can choose an individual package of classes and a personalized learning pace in the Khan Academy Kids English app. Thanks to this approach, the baby will be able to harmoniously perceive the world around him, believe in his own strength, rejoice in achievements and strive to gain new knowledge. And parents will be confident that their children are getting the best. In some applications, the correct solution is missing: any player action leads to a new development of the plot. The creators of the Bumazhki interactive creative studio believe that, once in a successful situation, a child can fully reveal his creative potential and worry about the result.
Gadgets are a reality from which there is no longer anywhereget away. The younger generation is studying the world of information technology with interest, absorbing everything new like a sponge. It is very important that developers of apps for kids use the process responsibly. Quality should be in everything from graphics to content. Coding skills are not enough to create a good learning product. It is imperative to involve good specialists in the development, who have knowledge in the field of children's development, their thinking and other mental functions.
See also:
In the era of ecosystems: how IT giants are turning into interfaces of our everyday life
The Doomsday glacier turned out to be more dangerous than scientists thought. We tell the main thing
GitHub has replaced the term "master" with a neutral equivalent