Children’s design: Rumbox – an interactive constructor for developing the creative potential of preschoolers

Abstract

The article examines the theoretical and practical foundations of using children’s design as a means of developing the creative potential of older preschoolers, using the example of the interactive constructor «Rumbox». The relevance of addressing design and project-based activities is substantiated in the context of the digitalization of childhood and the decline in indicators of divergent thinking among children aged 5-7. The aim of the study is to provide a theoretical rationale, development, and experimental verification of the methodology for applying «Rumbox» to purposefully develop components of creative potential (fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration) and spatial thinking in preschoolers. The study was conducted on a sample of 140 children aged 5,5-6,5 years, divided by stratified randomization into experimental and control groups of 70 persons each; during eight months, the experimental group was engaged in a program of activities with the interactive modular constructor «Rumbox», while the control group used traditional building sets. The diagnostic toolkit included adapted subtests of the E. Torrance battery, the «Architect» technique, and expert evaluation of children’s creative products; statistical data processing was performed in the IBM SPSS Statistics software package using descriptive statistics, Student’s t-test, and the Pearson correlation coefficient. The results of the initial stage confirmed the equivalence of the groups, whereas upon completion of the formative experiment, statistically significant (p<0.001) advantages of the experimental group were revealed across all indicators, with an average increase of 68,43% versus 16,32% in the control group, and an efficiency coefficient on average more than four times higher than that of the traditional approach; strong positive correlations were established between the time of engagement with the constructor and the levels of originality, elaboration, and spatial thinking. The conclusion is made regarding the high didactic and developmental effectiveness of the interactive constructor «Rumbox» as a means of children’s design, and its inclusion in preschool and family educational practices is justified for creating a developmental object-spatial environment.