"The panda wants to know how to do it and I will show her/him" - What we learn from young children's ability to take the role as teacher

One of the aims of the project is to contribute to increased knowledge about how the abilities that are referred to as theory of mind develop in children of age 3-6, and to do this in an everyday context in contrast to a laboratory context.

The project contributes to increased knowledge about how the abilities that are referred to as theory of mind develop in children of age 3-6, and to do this in an everyday context in contrast to a laboratory context. There are many open questions: What are the steps in the stepwise development? How large is the variation between children? Is it possible to support children who are slow in their development of a theory of mind? The questions concern an essential aspect of human nature: human understanding of ones own and others' minds. They are also important from an educaitonal perspective: children with a well-developed capacity to think and reflect on their own mind and thinking tend to do well in school. A reason for their being so many open questions is that it is very difficult to get reliable data from studies with young children. Our reserach group (Educational technology Group) has, together with School of Education, Stanford, deveoped a novel method for approaching young childrens' cognitive abilities via studies of an everyday activbity in their every day environment, where we collect a large amount of detailed data without interfering with the activities as well as talk to the children about what they are doing which elicits much spontaneous talk and reasoning. The method centres around a reserach instrument in the form of a digital play-&-learn game that we have developed in collaboration with the Stanford research team.