WEBVTT

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We've done some work where we've used computer models, and we've had the students also sketch.

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And the students who just used the computer models didn't develop their skills nearly as well

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as the students who also sketched.

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And so having something where your hands are involved in doing something, building something,

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drawing something, or analyzing something-if you have your hands involved,

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it seems to develop your 3-D spatial skills better than just looking at things,

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or trying to memorize things or looking at computer simulations of things.

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That really, it's kind of-to me, spatial skills is your hand connected to your brain.

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So the more that you involve your hands in doing things, I think,

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the better you develop your spatial skills.

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We do a lot of sketching of things in our classroom.

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So and we bring in a lot of props from outside.

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We show what 3-D axes look like.

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You can easily build 3-D axes out of tinker toys.

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In the elementary grades they've done work where they have students building castles,

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and they use that castle to then tell a story about something that's going on.

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And just, you know, anything that involves the space around you.

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So drawing a map from here to there would be another way

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to help develop the students' spatial skills.

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Part of the problem with spatial skills training is that even though it's been recognized

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as an area of cognitive research for a hundred years and people have talked about it,

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that most programs-most education programs-don't really talk about it.

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A lot of my colleagues, especially in engineering, think that spatial skills are a given.

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And so, "Well everybody has these skills."

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Or they believe that if you don't have them you can never develop them.

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It's not really rocket science, trying to help people develop spatial skills.

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I mean, it might help somebody become a rocket scientist, but really,

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the basic stuff and helping people develop their spatial skills is really not

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that difficult if you try it and practice it.

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And usually when I've shown teachers just a few things,

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they can go off and do a lot of things on their own.

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We have some materials that we developed for our university class on teaching spatial skills.

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We also have some teachers who have used materials in their classrooms

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for developing spatial skills in middle school and in the high school.

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And again, most of this involves building an object and then sketching it, or building an object

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and rotating in space and sketching it or doing something like that.

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But it's a lot of sketching type problems.

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I think technology can demonstrate a lot of things about space that we can't demonstrate,

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like for example, in earth science.

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You can build a three dimensional model of what this vein of ore looks like,

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and you can't really see it in real life.

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So you couldn't even take a field trip and see it.

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You'd have to imagine that it was underneath your ground-underneath your feet.

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But, you could build a computer model that shows that very well

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so that students would be able to see it.

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"Oh, that's what this looks like when you've got this vein of ore going at this slope.

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And this is why the miners dig this way, or this is why, you know,

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we have to extract the minerals this way."

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Technology can really help in showing people things and helping them visualize,

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but I don't think it's the do-all, end-all.

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I think you still need to do some hand drawn sketching,

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the manipulation of real life physical objects.

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I mean, those kinds of things are still important.

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For my own, personal history, when I started as an engineering freshman,

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I had very poorly developed spatial skills, and I think that's part of the reason I went

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into this area of work-was because I had struggled so much in my own background.

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And I think through practice, through you know, trying and sketching things and doing things

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with handheld objects, you can develop your spatial skills.

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It's not just something that you're born with it or not.