Stimulation of Spatial Reasoning in Children Aged 6 to 7 Using Assistive Technology, Computer Vision, and Elements of Inca and Cañari Cultures

Spatial reasoning is an essential skill for children to understand how objects move within a three-dimensional space. This skill begins to develop in infancy as babies recognize body parts and the positions of surrounding objects and people. Young children enhance their spatial understanding through play, such as using shape-sorters or open-ended building blocks, which allow them to grasp spatial concepts and visualize shapes mentally. In Ecuador today, there remains a lack of technological tools to support the development of spatial reasoning in children aged 6 to 7 years from a playful perspective. Therefore, this article presents a tool based on a robotic assistant and a vision module designed to stimulate the development of this skill in children through the lens of Inca and Cañari cultures. The robotic assistant represents a guinea pig that moves across a model featuring motifs from these two cultures. The movement of the robotic assistant is controlled by a vision module that captures overhead images, processes them, and analyzes the spatial locations of obstacles and target objects representing cultural elements (such as clothing, food, etc.). To conduct a preliminary evaluation of the tool’s functionalities, a consensus analysis was performed with four experts in the field of education, yielding a moderate level of consensus as indicated by the Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W=0.43997) and an associated p-value of 0.02694. These results are encouraging and suggest that the tool is promising for use in classrooms with children.