ويكي: Talk The Talk: Spatial Thinking and Tensegrity

الاثنين، 21 أكتوبر 2013

Talk The Talk: Spatial Thinking and Tensegrity

Tensegrity's inventors were spatial thinkers.

Buckminster Fuller was born far-sighted at a young age. He reports that his world was a blur. He knew structure from playing spatially with toothpicks and peas. It was not until he was four years old that he received glasses and began to really see clearly. Thanks to Fuller's advocacy of constructing shapes using toothpicks and food, there are many classrooms today where kids put together gummy-candies and toothpicks. A teacher seeking support for leading such a session sites "aiding spatio-motor conceptual activity."

Kenneth Snelson was also an early spatio-motor improvement person; tinkerer might be a better word but won't sound as grand. KQED, the public radio station of Northern California, recently published two articles on spatial thinking.

Spatial thinking “finds meaning in the shape, size, orientation, location, direction or trajectory, of objects,” and their relative positions, and “uses the properties of space as a vehicle for structuring problems, for finding answers, and for expressing solutions.” Spatial skill can be measured through reliable and valid paper-and-pencil tests—primarily ones that assess three dimensional mental visualization and rotation. Read more about examples of items that measure spatial skill here.

But despite the value of these kinds of skills, spatially talented students are, by and large, neglected. Nearly a century ago, a talent search conducted by Lewis Terman used the highly verbal Stanford-Binet in an attempt to discover the brightest kids in California. This test identified a boy named Richard Nixon who would eventually become the U.S. president, but two others would miss the cut likely because the Stanford-Binet did not include a spatial test: William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, who would go on to become famous physicists and win the Nobel Prize.

Toys can foster spatial thinking, and we have pictured in this post three toys that enable people to think spatially in tensegrity ways: the Skwish by Manhattan Toy, Tensegritoy (no longer manufactured, but you can find used sets on auction sites), and Zometool.

Einstein, Tesla and Edison were spatial thinkers, which brings up another important aspect of learning aptio-motor conceptualization: you need to also talk the talk. Talking about manipulation is critical to enabling effective spatial thinking.

What’s really important, however, are the conversations that adults and children have as they interact with these toys, and as they observe the world around them. In a study published last year in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, for example, Temple University psychology professor Nora Newcombe and her coauthors found that parents and children playing with blocks together were much more likely to use spatial terms like “over,” “around,” and “through,” than participants who played with a pre-assembled toy—and that it’s hearing and voicing such words that helps improve children’s spatial awareness.

Another 2011 study, this one from the University of Chicago, reported that the number of spatial terms (like “circle,” “curvy,” and “edge”) parents used while interacting with their toddlers predicted how many of these kinds of words children themselves produced, and how well they performed on spatial problem-solving tasks at a later age.

Montessori already focuses on spatial practices, but have a bit too many right-angle blocks and too few tensegrity toys that coordinate along triangulated lines.