Piagets Toy Project

In this paper, I will provide a description of various theoretical stages of Piaget's theory, and search various catalogues, websites, or stores, to locate a toy or a game that meets the developmental requirements of each stage and then I will give a brief account of a toy or a game I played with and how it functioned. Sensorimotor Stage According to Piaget (2015), the sensorimotor stage is the beginning phase in cognitive development. This phase begins from the time an infant is born to about the age of two years; infants at this period learn things using their motor and sensory interactions. At this stage, infants most often develop from reflex actions to full representation of the object. A reflex action is an action that we cannot control consciously.

Another example of the game at this stage is play dough. This kind of toy is either purchased or made. With these toys, children engage in a somewhat exploratory activity such as picking up a toy and intentionally putting it in his or her mouth. I do not remember much at this stage, but I believe I played with puppets mostly, especially the ones shaped in animals and human beings. A puppet generally is an object, which is animated. Piaget considered children at this age to reason based on the performance of logical operations in solving problems. Children at this stage find it hard to make logical reason in problem-related tasks. Piaget proposed that what limits children in the preoperational stage is their egocentrism.

Egocentrism in this context is used to emphasize that children could not operate logically the way in which another person perceived the world, especially if that view differed from their own. The way children think at this stage sometimes tend to be magical—it is also the same stage that most children believe in Santa Claus. An example of the game I played with at this age was Monopoly, which is a classing game that involves purchasing and trading of properties and also developing these properties with hotels and houses. This specific game is named after the economic concept of monopoly. The game requires at least two plays, so I remember playing with my family and sometimes my sibling. Such a game is good for the endless imagination of a child at this stage of development.

The game is generally a family game, and most people always say such games are good for children and it is very easy to learn and endlessly fun. While children at this stage make a lot of progress in terms of thinking, they are still unable to think in an abstract way about problems. Playing with toys in the concrete operations phase becomes focused on activities that have instructions as these children are able to comprehend better the limitations that come along with rules of that ensures the continuation of playing. At this stage, however, the kinds of toys that tend to be beautiful to children also change with maturity. For instance, older children would show more interest in monotonous activities, which creates some sort of feedback, such as drumming a table or trembling a rattle to produce sound.

Scrabble base board game is an instance of such a game. According to Piaget, children begin to develop abstract reasoning after a period of eleven years as they shift into formal operation development stage. The concept of formal operation is derived from the idea that it involves various aspects of abstract, hypothetical reasoning which can be applied to various tasks that can be solved with the help of logical perception. It is assumed, therefore, that children develop various theories about the world and the people in it from the past future and present. At this period, adolescents develop hypothetical reasoning (Saxe, 2015). This kind of reasoning involves the ability to form a hypothesis based on the way the world works and then in a logical and systematic way reasons about the methods of testing such theories.