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This paper presents the development and formative testing of a preschool spatial orientation intervention using a design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach. Over the course of eight weeks in both classroom and home settings, spatial language, navigation, and modelling skills are fostered through curriculum that incorporates books, hands-on activities, movement, and digital tools, including an augmented reality (AR) app. Co-design with teachers, user studies, and pilot testing informed iterative revisions to ensure usability, instructional support, and engagement for diverse learners. Findings indicate that the activities fill a curricular gap, promote spatial vocabulary and reasoning, and are generally well received by teachers, parents, and children. While the AR app shows promise for enhancing motivation and collaboration, challenges related to usability and scaffolding remain. This work contributes to early childhood STEM education by providing accessible, developmentally appropriate resources that support spatial thinking, especially for underserved communities, and offers insights into integrating technology effectively in preschool learning environments. 

Collecting and organizing data to understand and answer real-world questions is an increasingly important skill in our current world. Fostering data collection and analysis (DCA) skills in young children leverages key mathematics skills as well as the data representation, visualization, and interpretation skills of computational thinking (CT), culminating in a problem-solving approach with data. As such, the intervention, comprising investigations and a digital app, supported preschool teachers and children to answer data-focused questions by engaging in each step of the DCA process in order to foster CT and math skills. Teachers appreciated that the app offers a new way for children to visualize data and noted that the app provided learning opportunities for children that would not otherwise be possible or easy to implement. Results also suggest that the app provides a systematic process for data collection, entry, and interpretation. Children in classrooms that completed the intervention had significantly higher scores at post-intervention compared to children in classrooms that did not complete the intervention, controlling for pre-intervention scores, B(SE) = 0.13(0.05), t (6) = 2.48, p = .048.