Angle discrimination by walking in children

Abstract

In primary school, children tend to have difficulties in discriminating angles of different degrees and categorizing them either as acute or obtuse, especially at the first stages of development (6-7 y.o.). In the context of a novel approach that intends to use other sensory modalities than visual to teach geometrical concepts, we ran a psychophysical study investigating angle perception by spatially navigating in space. Our results show that the youngest group of children tend to be more imprecise when asked to discriminate the walking angle of 90°, pivotal to learn how to differentiate between acute and obtuse angles. These results are then discussed in terms of the development of novel technological solutions aimed to integrate locomotion in the teaching of geometrical concepts.