Sketching has been part of education for centuries, but up until now has had little adoption by educational technology platforms. Sketching is used in engineering, mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, and many vocational fields. Learning how to sketch three dimensional (3D) shapes has been shown to improve spatial visualization, which is the ability to manipulate 2D and 3D images in one?s mind, and is an important skill in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). It is essential to improve STEM education, since there is an estimated need for 1 million more STEM professionals in the U.S. over the next decade. However, the dropout rate for students in STEM majors is close to 50%. Studies have shown that improving spatial visualization skills is one way to increase graduation rates in STEM, especially among women and other underrepresented minorities.

Up until this project, sketching to improve spatial visualization ability has primarily been done with paper and pencil. eGrove Education has developed software in which students sketch assignments on a touchscreen tablet, phone, or computer. The software algorithms automatically grade the sketch and provide personalized hints when a student is stuck. This new approach is more engaging to students and easier to teach, and thereby can make spatial visualization training more widely accessible.

In a Phase I SBIR grant, eGrove Education developed their spatial visualization training software such that it was ready to be used in classroom trials. One trial showed that a class that used the Spatial Vis? app had over three times as many students raise their spatial visualization ability to the point that they were above an ?at risk? level compared to a class that did not use the software. 

In this Phase II SBIR grant, significant developments were made so that the benefits of the Spatial Vis? educational platform could be used much more widely. The pedagogical approach was improved to elicit productive struggle in students through the use of mini-hints, which are small hints that a teacher looking over the shoulder of a student might say. The software platform was rewritten from the ground up so that it could support a wide array of mobile and computer devices now and in the future. The necessary privacy safeguards were incorporated so that the software could be used throughout K-12. Teacher support was improved so that teachers could quickly see if specific students were falling behind and Teacher Resources were developed to support effective instruction inside and out of the classroom. Furthermore, during Phase II, a Alpha version of the Drawn2Math? app was developed to teach fractions at the 4th grade math level, which had very promising early classroom feedback. 

Our impact will be broad. Early users for Spatial Vis? consisted of students in introductory engineering or Computer Aided Design (CAD) classes at the 2 and 4 year college level. During COVID-19 we saw increased interest in K-12 due to the suitability for remote learning, and have extended our users in Career Technology Education courses in K-12 ranging from agriculture to manufacturing to pre-Engineering . We have received recognition for our software?s ability to measure and indeed increase student persistence by rewarding students who retry an incorrect sketch until they get it right. Our approach sets itself apart from other educational technology that often uses multiple-choice questions that do not have the ability for students to retry assignments to improve persistence. In the long term the approach of using digitized student sketches for education will have a broad impact in STEM and beyond.

Last Modified: 04/14/2021
Modified by: Lelli Vandeneinde