Digital games are becoming more and more popular worldwide, arousing children's interest and fostering their motivation. Furthermore, tablets and smartphones are increasingly popular and widespread all around the globe, guaranteeing access to the web and to an ever-growing availability of games. This paper is based on the assumption that introducing digital game play into primary schools may support the development and consolidation of some transversal skills in a way that is perceived by students as interesting and motivating. When the games are carefully selected, the great effort spent by children in playing will provide them with the possibility to acquire and exercise, at an early age, basic skills which are important for their future. In particular, in this paper, different modalities in which digital games can be used in primary schools to foster basic transversal skills are presented. Logic and spatial reasoning skills as well as computational thinking are in particular considered. The reported experiments show that game based activities, when appropriately organized, can positively affect students' school performance as well as students' learning attitudes and behavior.

Although several investigations of spatial reasoning and mental rotation skills have been conducted in research areas linked to STEM education, to the best of our knowledge, few of these studies have examined the relationship between spatial reasoning and computational thinking. Given this gap in the literature, the present study investigates the role and action of spatial reasoning, and specifically the effects of mental rotation on computational thinking within an embodied and enacted perspective. To achieve this, we carried out a study involving 92 students in five primary-school classes (1st grade - 5th grade). The findings reveal a positive correlation between computational thinking skill and mental rotation ability.

This study examined the feasibility of the Atkinson Battery for Child Development for Examining Functional Vision (Atkinson, Anker, Rae, et al., 2002) to evaluate neurovisual functions of children with neurodevelopmental disorders in outpatient setting. A total of 90 patients underwent a comprehensive evaluation. Among these, a group of 33 children with Cerebral Palsy (CP), mean age 6 years, with different types of CP (26% diplegic, 37% hemiplegic and 37% tetraplegic) were selected to constitute the cohort of the study. Visual sensory measures as well as higher level visual functions were considered. Overall, 73% patients had impairments at the assessment protocol, the majority of which presenting difficulties on both visuoperceptual and visuospatial tasks (79%). Subgroups of participants presented similar profiles of impairments with spared basic visuocognitive abilities and limitations in visuoperceptual and visuospatial domains. The Atkinson's battery proved to be valuable for evaluation in outpatient setting and follow-up testing. Some limitations emerged. For the definition of personalized and detailed rehabilitation programs a breakdown of the different components of vision and subsequent in-depth evaluation are needed. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.