Teaching Spatial Skills Online During a Global Pandemic

Numerous studies have shown the importance of spatial skills to engineering success, particularly in engineering graphics courses. Sorby and others developed an intervention consisting of software and a workbook in the 1990s aimed at improving spatial skills for engineering students. Implementation of the intervention has been shown to improve: spatial skills, grades in introductory STEM courses, and retention/graduation rates for first-year engineering students. In response to the global pandemic, course materials have been revised to facilitate remote learning. Resources for each module include video mini-lectures, online software, and Getting Started videos that show the basics in sketching and other topics. The original workbook includes multiple-choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank questions as well as sketching exercises. Previous research shows the importance of sketching in developing spatial skills. Partially in response to the pandemic, the fixed choice (multiple-choice, matching, etc.) questions in the workbook were converted to Canvas quizzes, and a new workbook was developed with only the sketching content from the original workbook. In addition, sketching problems were created for modules that didn’t have those previously, and practice problems were created for difficult topics. The practice problems included solutions and examples of common student mistakes. This paper describes instructor experiences in teaching with the new materials. Student comments, gain scores on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations, and samples of student work are also highlighted in the paper. Recommendations for the future of spatial skills instruction using these new resources in a non-Covid world are also included in the paper.