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Spatial skills are valuable for many reasons. Not just the obvious ones - like being able to find your way or remember where you parked - but for all kinds of learning and development. spatial skills have connections with success in lots of fields, mostly in science and technology.
Spatial skills are also malleable: they can be improved. There are lots of ways to do this, including things like sketching exercises, puzzle games and construction activities. spatiaLEGO combines some of these development activities into a building challenge. The challenge taps into well established spatial development materials and uses LEGO for interaction.
Practicing these kind of activities can improve spatial skills and help development in loads of different ways!
This site is a work in progress which will be updated with more information as the Explorathon activity develops.
What are Spatial Skills?
Spatial skills are cognitive, internal skills which help us to understand space and spatial ideas. They help us do things like imagine an object in our head and rotate it or imagine what it would look like sliced in two. They also help us understand how different objects are located in space, which is really useful for navigation.
There are lots of different kinds of spatial skills, but they all appear to work in the same part of the brain: the hippocampal lobe. This is a very primitive part of the brain which plays an important role in transferring information from short-term to long-term memory.
Why are Spatial Skills Important?
Aside from more obvious ways that spatial skills can be useful - like helping navigation and seeing things from different perspectives, there is now lots of research which points to spatial skills being useful in work and study, particularly in science and technology. People with good spatial skills test scores are more likely to succeed in STEM degrees and work. This applies from primary school maths all the way up to expert-level computer programming.
Although we evolved components of the hippocampal lobe - where spatial skills work - for navigation as early humans, we actually use these parts of our brain for a lot more. We use cells in the hippocampal lobe to create representations of all sorts of non-verbal information.
Non-verbal and abstract information is very important in science, maths and technology, where often the things we need to think about can't really be seen. Complex engines, chemical molecules, computer programs and systems, and many more! If we want to understand these kinds of things, we need to be able to create complex representations of them in our heads. Spatial skills help us do that, so people with better spatial skills are more likely to succeed in these fields.
How can Spatial Skills be Improved?
Thankfully, spatial skills are quite malleable, which means that most people are able to improve them. There are many ways this can happen: through construction toys like LEGO, through video games, or through formal practice. Formal practice isn't very common, though, so many people develop spatial skills through extra-curricular activities rather than in typical education.
We are making some changes to try and fix that, though. At the University of Glasgow, we train the spatial skills of computing science students, with the goal of rolling this out further across the university. We have also recently launched the STEM SPACE Project, aimed at developing spatial skills in primary schools.
More Information
About the Author
spatiaLEGO was conceived by Jack Parkinson, who is a researcher at the Univeristy of Glasgow exploring spatial skills.
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Background Research
There is a lot of work connecting spatial skills with success in many domains. Here is some relating to computing science specifically.
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Current Project
The team behind this work is deploying a spatialised maths curriculum in Scottish primary schools.
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