Enhancing Students’ Spatial Skills with Augmented Reality Experiences

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving student engagement and student learning outcomes for engineering students in engineering graphics, a foundational course in many engineering programs. Understanding engineering design specifications is a critical skill for making decisions in the engineering workforce. Students need to learn how to analyze and interpret these specifications, which often involves visualizing a 2D drawing as a 3D model and vice versa. Being able to convert between these two representations enables engineers to communicate ideas and designs more effectively with other stakeholders. Students’ spatial skills as cognitive skills can be improved with intentional instruction supported by effective learning resources. This project will develop and assess an augmented reality application that will display visual aids to guide students in analyzing lines and surfaces. Students will be guided through a step-by-step animation to show how 2D drawings relate to a 3D model. This study will assess the impact of the application on student engagement and students’ spatial skills for students from traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering. Project results will be made available to the STEM education community through a project website and workshops for faculty. The goal of this project is to improve students’ spatial skills by engaging students in active learning using an augmented reality application. The application will provide visual aids such as highlighting and shading to assist students in comprehending the relationship between lines and surfaces. Students will be able to rotate a 3D model with their fingers or follow an animation that connects points to create lines and surfaces in an interactive immersive environment. Incentive mechanisms such as points, levels, badges, and additional challenge problems will be used to motivate students to solve problems. Embedded multiple choice questions will be used to assess students’ understanding. Annotations and contextual information will be added to each question to motivate students and provide feedback on their answers. The project will use validated instruments in a within- and between-subjects design to assess the impact of the active learning experiences on students’ spatial skills and attitudes in an engineering graphics course. Beyond sharing the findings through peer-reviewed journals, and conference presentations, a project website will be developed and maintained which will provide access to assessment results and project-related materials. Lessons learned and guidelines for implementing the augmented reality application in courses will be shared with interested faculty members via workshops and outreach activities. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.