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.

   

I Made This Myself

"Don't you love it when a plan comes together?" That saying John "Hannibal" Smith used to use on the "A Team" television show expresses the feeling I got when I read about the MakerMovement that encourages children to build what they imagine and crowdfunding by a Kickstarter, RocketHub, or Kiva. Since there is a way for anyone to find investors, anyone in the world who has an idea for a new app, 3D printer creation, programmable device, or, what one visionary has proposed, an automated factory on the moon, now has an opportunity to raise the money needed to make an innovation a reality.


     In an interview conducted by station KQED (kqed.org) in Northern California, Dale Dougherty, CEO of MakerMedia and editor of MAKE magazine, told how he began promoting hands-on learning at a Maker Faire in 2006 and later at MakerCon conferences. He is devoted to the idea that tinkering with the tools and materials for making things can be fun.

     Project Zero, a research study developed by Harvard's Graduate School of Education and tested by classroom teachers in Oakland, California, aims to inspire students to be curious about the designs that make things and nature work. When students looked at a pencil and a snail, they began to ask questions, not only about how they worked, but also what kind of designs could help them do a better job. Some youngsters even suggested ways to make life better for the snail. And there was a crossover to discover the new words needed to describe a design process and to defend ideas of how things are made.

     Since schools can't do everything, there is a greater role for parents, childcare, Boys and Girls Clubs, 4H, community centers, church youth groups, and scouting programs. They can provide the things kids need to help them create, perform, and learn: blocks, LEGOs, Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, computers, 3D printers, pottery wheels, found objects, cameras, watercolors, easels, musical instruments, a stage, and garden plots. It's rather expensive, but, for $16.95 per month, tinker.kiwicrate,com/inside-a-crate will send students, 9 to 16+, a hands-on STEM (science, engineering, technology) inspired maker project.

    Making all kinds of materials available to students helps them discover new possibilities. That's reason enough to provide a place to cook, bake, sew, make jewelry, and knit. Inspired by puffy sourdough and flatter pizza dough an artist combined them and twisted, carved, and painted them into what became an octopus sculpture. A businessman inspired children to create sculptures out of the shredded documents he dumped into a pail of water.

     According to experiments at Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, involving the body in learning also helps improve memory needed in any subject. When hands manipulate objects, for example, the brain has more cues to remember what was learned. When my mother was a math consultant for the Chicago Public School System, the first thing she did when she visited a school was observe what manipulative devices were in use. If she saw few or none, her next step was to try to find the supply room or closet where they were kept, because she knew that after the Russians sent up Sputnik, the federal government funded purchases of many such devices to aid learning math. I remember seeing one of my favorites, a scale that allowed kids to balance numbers on one side with those on the other. A big "5", for example, would equal a little "2" and "3" on the other side.

      Earlier blog posts have related ideas. See "Transform Spaces into Creative Places," "Back to the Land," "Tin Can Art," and "Global Drawing Power."