Stimulating and assessing transversal skills with digital games: the case of logic and spatial reasoning

This contribution is focused on the role that digital mind games can have in stimulating and assessing primary school students' transversal skills, that is, those cross-skills that are at the basis of the learning of many different disciplines. Thinking skills and, more specifically, logic and spatial reasoning skills are in particular considered. Early activities in this field appear to be particularly effective, especially if we consider that thinking skills develop slowly and that primary school offers usually a more flexible context, both as far as curricula constraints and time organization, to introduce non-traditional activities. A number of field experiments carried out in primary school classes highlighted the pedagogical potential of mind games to support and foster problem solving and reasoning skills and showed that their use under certain conditions may also have a positive impact on school performance in curricular subjects such as mathematics. The research studies performed allowed to face the topic according to complementary perspectives: - analysis of the skills involved in the use of a selected number of mind games (Bottino & Ott, 2006) - impact of the use of mind games on school performance, behaviour and attitudes (Bottino et al., 2007, 2014); - analysis of interface and game mechanics features that make mind games more or less suited for learning (Bottino et al., 2009); in particular, investigation of the relationship between immersion in virtual reality, presence and performance in spatial reasoning (Freina et Al., 2016).