Norena Martin-Dorta

A 3D Educational Mobile Game to Enhance Student's Spatial Skills

Recent studies have brought attention to the pedagogical potential of mobile devices, and various experiments have tested tools in handheld devices, indicating that they strengthen and support learning in different fields. The purpose of the work presented in this paper was to design a 3D construction mobile game for 3D spatial visualization training, with the aim of familiarizing users with a 3D environment and improving their understanding of the 2D-3D relationship. This paper describes the architecture of the system that we developed, which includes several different applications: (a) a mobile game played on touch screen devices to permit students to solve exercises about building models with unit-sized cubes in a 3D environment, (b) a PC application, to permit the teacher to design exercises and manage users, and (c) a server application and a database to collect and manage data. The J2ME Mobile 3D Graphics library is used and development is done in Netbeans. Satisfaction questionnaires and observation records were kept of work done by the users in order to evaluate the mobile game. The results show a high degree of satisfaction with the game and that users realize how useful this game can be for the proposed aims.

Virtual Blocks: a serious game for spatial ability improvement on mobile devices

This paper presents a novel spatial instruction system for improving spatial abilities of engineering students. A 3D mobile game application called Virtual Blocks has been designed to provide a 3D virtual environment to build models with cubes that help students to perform visualization tasks to promote the development of their spatial ability during a short remedial course. A validation study with 26 freshman engineering students at La Laguna University (Spain) has concluded that the training had a measurable and positive impact on students’ spatial ability. In addition, the results obtained using a satisfaction questionnaire show that Virtual Blocks is considered an easy to use and stimulating application.

Combining Virtual Reality and Relaxation Techniques to Improve Attention Levels in Students from an Initial Vocational Qualification Program

The objective of this study is to verify whether Virtual Reality together with relaxation techniques incorporated into it improve the students’ attention levels. To do so we made an intervention in an “Initial Vocational Qualification Program” group of Spanish high school in the Valencia metropolitan area. We had 13 students aged between 16 and 19 that participated in the study using an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. These students were subject to an experimental environment that simulates a beach sunset. They had to perform breathing exercises and concentrate their attention on their breathing, the rhythm of the waves and on flowers of different colors that were appearing in the environment. Experimental results have revealed that levels of attention measured with the Trail Making Test (TMT) were improved when participants had the help of the virtual environment.

Individual Differences in Spatial Abilities: Effects of Gender and Videogames

Spatial Abilities are cognitive skills that are linked to success in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) fields. The goal of this paper is to develop a predictive model of Mental Rotation and Spatial Visualization scores to freshman engineering students. To this end, we conducted a study with 433 students at University of La Laguna in autumn of 2004. The ANCOVA analysis showed that gender, age, videogame players, the years that students course technical drawing and if they are workers are significant variables. The paper propose two predictive models for Mental Rotation and Spatial Visualization that helps us early detect students with lower levels of spatial abilities.