ABSTRACT
Observations of young children engaged in constructive free play as they develop science, mathematics, technology, engineering, arts and architectural concepts leads us to our efforts to categorize specific emergent STEAM concepts. We will see how these concepts can be developed into codes that will provide practitioners and researchers of education and developmental psychology with the tools to record specific emergent STEAM concepts of any child participating in constructive free play. After hundreds of hours of analysis, I have developed the Space-Architecture Coding (SPARC) system, which includes four basic coding themes—symmetric relations, geometric relations, direction/location, architecture/engineering—altogether including a total of 17 codes. The use of the SPARC coding system will better enable practitioners and researchers to organize young children’s emergent STEAM thinking concepts in a way that allows them to connect what Vygotsky calls spontaneous (everyday, out-of-school) concepts with conventionally systematic (scientific) concepts that are presented in school.
