Virtual Construction Kits

The “Studio of art designing” develops and publishes electronic creative education programs for children and young people. All virtual kits represent miniature programs each designed for a small but clear task. The main purpose of each construction kit is to reveal the meaning of some aspect of the creative process. Virtual construction kits suggest the user making their own work of art. However, this creative process is done with the help of means and methods that develop the user’s thinking. Thus, the user gets to know this phenomenon “from the inside.” Virtual kits have found application in textbooks for a comprehensive school and as an accompaniment to museum projects. Projects related to the Russian Avant-Garde, antique vase-painting, steampunk, infographics, animation, “laterna magica” and visual storytelling are used in many secondary schools and museums in Russia.

The Robotic Construction Kit as a Tool for Cognitive Stimulation in Children and Adolescents: The RE4BES Protocol

Through numerous experiences, the robotics has been demonstrated to have good potential in the field of strengthening social skills in children with Special Educational Needs and in particular with autism spectrum disorder. There are still not many experimental studies on the cognitive enhancement and social skills of children with special needs conducted with robotics construction kits that, requiring both the construction of the robot body and the programming of its “mind“, bring into play a multiplicity of cognitive and social skills. For the aforementioned reasons our team from the University of Palermo and from the Center MetaIntelligenze ONLUS developed the treatment protocol RE4BES, which is a collection of guidelines for realizing robotics personalized activities for children with special needs. In this paper, two studies will be described concerning the first application of activities drawn from the RE4BES protocol. The first study concerns the use of the robotic construction kits for the stimulation of visuo-spatial abilities; in the second study the robot construction kits have been used to stimulate the attentional abilities in a child with severe difficulties on focused attention tasks.