Building Blocks is a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to enable all young children
to build a solid foundation for mathematics. To ensure this, we used a design and development model
that drew from theory and research in each phase. Most developers claim a research basis for their
materials, but these claims are often vacuous or incomplete (Sarama & Clements, in press). Building
Blocks is research-based in several fundamental ways. Our design process is based on the assumption
that curriculum and software design can and should have an explicit theoretical and empirical foundation,
beyond its genesis in someone’s intuitive grasp of children’s learning. It also should interact with the
ongoing development of theory and research—reaching toward the ideal of testing a theory by testing the software and the curriculum in which it is embedded. Our model includes specification of mathematical
ideas (computer objects or manipulatives) and processes/skills (software “tools” or actions) and extensive
field-testing from the first inception through to large summative evaluation studies (Clements, 2002;
Clements & Battista, 2000; Sarama & Clements, in press). The next section briefly describes the phases
of our design process model. We illustrate these phases with the first of several preschool products that
will be produced by the Building Blocks project (Clements & Sarama, 2003).1