The central goal of the Agam Program for Visual Cognition is to help young children develop their visual thinking, as a means to improve their over-all cognitive and emotional development. The Agam Program was inspired, initiated and written by the artist Yaacov Agam (Agam, 1984).

The program was refined, implemented and tested by the staff of the Agam Project at the Science Teaching Department in the Weizmann Institute. From 1984-1990, this work focused on 3- to 5-year olds. (Razel & Eylon, 1986; 1990; Eylon & Rosenfeld, 1990; Hershkowitz & Markovitz, 1992; Markovitz & Hershkowitz, 1996, Hershkowitz, Parzysz & van Dormolen, 1996). Funding problems led to the closing of the program, despite the very promising practical and research outcomes (see "Educational Research" below).
In 2005, the Israeli Ministry of Education renewed the program's development, implementation and research with 3- to 5- year olds and continuing with the same groups to the third grade. Currently, the program is being implemented in about 90 Israeli preschools and in first- and second-grade classrooms in a several elementary schools, both at the Weizmann Institute as well as at the Teachers Seminary in Oranim, near Haifa. The program is enthusiastically received by the children, as well as by their teachers. Further development of the program is taking place.

The following example demonstrates how thinking is developed in the Agam Program. The first unit is Circle and the second is Square. The three- or four-year-old student becomes acquainted with these concepts by methods relying almost exclusively on non-verbal experiences, e.g., an activity in which each student takes one end of a rope — whose other end is fixed to some point (the center) — and by walking to create circles, experiences visually and physically the properties of a circle.

Using circles and square as "visual letters", the students next create patterns, which are "visual words" or "visual sentences" (Patterns is the program's third unit). A "pattern," in the sense used in the Agam program, is a visual periodic series whose elements, at this stage in the curriculum, are circles and squares of different sizes, colors, and positions, with changing intervals between them (See Figure 1).

Periodic series are the bases of many mathematical and scientific concepts, such as functions, waves, and movements. This unit tackles the concept visually in a way that is meaningful to the young student. In the patterns unit, all the activities deal with linear (one dimensional) patterns, but children's creativity is unbounded. See for instance, the "sun" in Figure 2a, in which a child has created a 2 dimensional periodic series that has a ray as the periodic theme, with each ray itself is a linear pattern. The matrix is another multidimensional pattern created by students; each row, each column, and the two main diagonals exhibit a linear pattern, and the whole matrix is a pattern with the column as the periodic theme (See Figure 2b).