2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Spatial ability has shown to be a crucial innate ability that can shape students’ decision to persist in engineering. Research has shown that students who may not have a higher degree of innate spatial ability can be trained to improve their spatial skills. Notably there is an inclusivity gap among students who identify with historically marginalized communities in engineering when it comes to spatial skills. Our project frames spatial skills as an opportunity to address this gap with the mindset that such spatial skills can be improved and are not inherent or fixed to a person, and the opportunity of augmented reality for such efforts is under explored. We strive to develop a gamified, augmented reality (AR) environment that can benefit students who identify with marginalized communities, such as women and socioeconomically disadvantaged, a different approach in learning and improving their spatial skills. We plan to implement this AR application in a graphical communication course that focuses on visualizing different views of objects and modeling these objects in computer-aided design software, and in this case, CATIA. The development of such environment is based on existing research on spatial skills education, with the focus on reducing students’ cognitive workload while learning how to manipulate 2D and 3D objects.
This poster will present our current progress of developing and integrating the AR tools and environments that will be launched for students’ learning purposes. We have been focusing on creating six modules based on the six different perspectives of objects for the AR integration: normal surface, inclined surface, oblique surface, cylindrical surface, auxiliary view, and section view. For each module, the different objects will be loaded onto the AR application, with color-codes that differentiate based on the orientation of the faces of the objects and are accessible to those who may be color-blind. The object will be divided into different parts so that students can manipulate parts to form the 3D object. The users of the AR environment can then activate or deactivate available display settings to help them visualizing these objects. In addition, the users will be able to rotate these objects to any orientation of their choice. Additionally, a series of videos with animations and annotations will be embedded into the AR application which guide students step by step to understand the relationship between the surface and corresponding surface edges in the given multiple views, which in return will help students complete the 3D isometric view and the missing multiple view.
The piloting of these AR environments as learning tools will happen in early summer 2024 in summer classes and K-12 outreach programs in our institution, we will present preliminary findings from survey and interview data from the students who participate in the pilot implementation. Overall, the no-cost AR application has the potential to benefit students to learn step by step in an interactive gamified learning environment anywhere and anytime and improve their spatial skills with their ability for students to manipulate an object at different perspectives, and the integration is an important step toward realizing this potential.