Spatial Education Programs are thought to be a series of workshops including activities that combine puzzles and games with construction, hands-on activities. The video and graphic materials augment the content making it attractive, engaging and creative.
Structured content is organized in 12+ workshops and it is intended to cover one year of activities in weekly sessions of about 1 hour.
These programs are intended for educational institutions that aim to develop STEM abilities of students, by training their spatial intelligence. Please Contact Us for additional information.
These resources are protected under patent PCT/US2013/069568 and Copyright laws.
Workshop Example: Globefish
Objectives
Solve 2D puzzles related to domain decomposition, partitioning and pattern detection. Build kinetic structures and investigate their properties. Understand tension and elasticity. Experiment with stability, symmetry, rotation, locking, pressure and centrifuge force. Use the kit elements and follow the video and printed instructions to achieve the goals of this project.
Materials
1. Movies from the XColony channel on YouTube
2. Elements and documents from the construction kit
Organization
The workshop is organized in teams of 4-6 participants.
Activities
1. Presentation of the theme and objectives (10 min)
- watch the introductory and step-by-step video instructions
- brainstorming on the content of the movies: how many items have been identified, what kind of description could be associated with them, what other names should be given to these items in order to better designate them? Find associations with objects from reality and life, science (flowers, animals, crystals, molecules) and art (films, tilings, architecture, origami).
2. Inspection of Resources (5 min)
- identification/designation of the elements,
- generate hypothesis on their use and foresee the final construction to be made
3. Playing and Learning Activities. Construction, Puzzle solving, Discovery (40 min)
- each team investigate through puzzle solving the 2D properties of the available elements
- visualize the way to construct the basic modules and construct all of them
- formulate the strategy to be applied to construct the final object: schedule tasks, assign tasks to members of the group equitably
- investigate geometric, kinetic and combinatorial properties of the final construction; visit other teams and discuss your findings; ask questions, challenge the others to pose problems and puzzles, ask for new solutions
4. Concluding the workshop (5 min):
- recall the most interesting part of the workshop (each team identify one)
- pack and store or distribute the final constructions. If the constructions are distributed there should be a fair system for that (e.g., a number of credits is assigned for every participant, each construction costs a number of credits, the student with a highest number of credits in the group will pick first and his/her number of credits is adjusted by the cost of the object). Students should be encouraged to design their own system of credits). After several sessions all students would have taken home at least one object.