Me and the environment. The path aims at intriguing and stimulating the desire for knowledge,
encouraging the development of cognitive faculties by identifying the relationship between daily activities and
environmental impact, promoting civic sense and respect for the environment, stimulating thoughtful thinking,
association and the ability to identify relationships and raise assumptions.
Me and the digital. The path aims at stimulating and motivating the child to acquire knowledge,
developing the cognitive faculties towards computational thinking through the use of the “digital”, through
which it is possible to build real representations of the world in which we interact, promoting logical thinking
and problem-solving skills.
The sessions, lasting 1h and 45 minutes each and carried out by museum professionals-educators,
represented the unstructured didactics training lasting for 90 days.
Sample and Procedures A total sample of 82 children aged between three and six was recruited for the analysis. This was divided
into an experimental group (unstructured training) consisting of 24 children, and two control groups, one of
which of Montessori didactics matrix, consisting of 30 children; the other, instead, was of classic (formal)
didactics matrix and composed of 28 children. The last two did not carry out unstructured training in order to
assess the actual benefit of unstructured didactics. Due to the lack of randomization of the sample, the work is
to be considered as an almost experimental design, but the research was structured with repeated measurements
in two times for the entire sample. An ex-ante evaluation was carried out through specific psychometric tests to
identify the linguistic level of each child in each group. At the end of the series of meetings, the same tests,
carried out in the initial phase, were repeated to the whole sample (Bonfiglio & Peluso Cassese, 2018;
Torregiani & Peluso Cassese, 2018).
