Make Spatial Relationships

When estimating the number of casualties planes flying into the World Trade Center's towers would cause, Osama bin Laden believed burning jet fuel only would weaken the steel above the plane crashes. According to Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, bin Laden thought higher floors would collapse, but lower ones would remain standing.

    Spatial relationships are important for architects and engineers who design buildings and cars and for dentists who need to know how upper and lower teeth should fit together, but being able to make accurate calculations about spatial relationships is a skill needed by people everywhere in the world. Check how the skill is used in the following examples:

• Knowing where to sit at a sporting event or play so the view isn't obstructed by a pole,
• Figuring how many cars can be parked in a lot,
• Assembling furniture by looking at instructions,
• Visualizing how atoms are arranged in a molecule,
• Deciding how many pans are needed to bake five dozen cookies for a bake sale.

Recent studies suggest ways to help children develop spatial visualization skills. Engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby recommends playing with blocks, using two-dimension instructions to build with LEGOs, holding objects and sketching them when turned in different positions. She also suggests introducing girls to the toys sold by Goldie Blox (goldieblox.com). Other teachers have had students draw maps, design 3-D treehouses, build robots, knit, play chess, and use 3-D modeling software SketchUp. Theater classes are a natural place to learn blocking, i.e. positioning and spacing actors so that everyone in the audience can see what is happening on stage. Art classes model with clay and learn techniques to create the illusion of space on a two-dimension surface. 

     The connection that seems to exist among spatial reasoning, math skills, creativity, and the arts is reason enough to get kids up and doing things all around the world.