Understanding advanced pre-tertiary mathematics, particularly three-dimensional vectors, demands robust spatial reasoning skills that many students find challenging to develop through traditional pedagogical methods. This study proposes and evaluates an innovative educational tool that leverages large vision models to automate the conversion of handwritten vector equations into accurate 3D graphical representations. By interpreting students’ handwritten input using advanced computer vision, the system provides immediate, interactive visual feedback to bridge the cognitive gap between abstract symbolic notation and tangible geometric concepts. We evaluated the system using a dataset of 1000 handwritten vector equations typical of the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level H2 Mathematics syllabus. Our findings demonstrate that while GPT-4o serves as a capable baseline, achieving 84.6% accuracy with multi-shot prompting, newer variants such as GPT-4.1-mini offer superior performance, reaching 91.4% accuracy with significantly higher computational efficiency. The results confirm that AI-powered visualisation tools can effectively interpret complex spatial mathematical layouts when guided by optimal prompt engineering. Implementing such technology in educational settings presents a viable, scalable, and cost-effective method to democratise learning support, fostering independent study and enhancing students’ conceptual comprehension of spatial mathematics.
Lim et al. (Sun,) studied this question.