Thriving children’s perceptual learning through educational environments color and material design

Being the place where children spend most of their daily lives, the educational environment plays a crucial role in children’s cognitive development. Indeed, pedagogy recognizes the role of space as the “third teacher,” promoting the importance of the interior environment’s multisensory quality, which can stimulate “perceptual learning,” - especially considering children aged 0-6 years - which is a progressive improvement in perceptual skills, nurtured by the direct experience. Through case study analysis and literature review, the paper aims to identify and categorize some color-material design strategies within educational interior environments, highlighting how this complexity can be related to multiple pedagogical and cultural factors. The multisensory features of colors and materials resulting from the above-mentioned aspects bring the outside world richness into the educational environment, training children to relate to and act within the complexity of the existing world (local and global, analog and virtual), while quantifying the effectiveness of this approach remains an open field of research.