A Graph-Theory Approach for Testing Children's Block Construction

Block construction is a central activity in childhood, engaging key motor and cognitive capabilities. Skills such as problem-solving, planning, and the intuitive understanding of physical principles are required during block building, all of which are foundational to later academic achievement in domains such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Past research has predominantly taken an outcome-oriented approach overlooking the underlying mechanisms and their connections to other skills. Here, we introduce a graph-theory framework to capture and analyze the sequential steps in children’s block construction activities. We tested our framework using a dataset of adults (n = 18) and children (n = 12; ages 7–10) building Duplo models. We took a process-oriented approach by using a novel video-annotation scheme that allowed us to generate graphical structures of the building process and extract measures that provided valuable insights into the differences between children and adults in the construction process. Our findings show that while adults take fewer steps, they take more time per step, and that children struggle to recover from errors more than adults. The framework is openly shared with the scientific community, aiming to provide the groundwork for other researchers who are interested in shifting from an outcome-oriented to a process-oriented approach when studying block construction.