Spatial-visual skills and engineering design

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students with strong spatial-visual skills tend to design more complex mechanisms for the undergraduate course Design and Manufacturing I. The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test was administered to 137 students enrolled in the course. Test scores were compared to student self-evaluations of experience with tasks associated with spatial reasoning such as building origami models and sketching. The complexity of 34 student robots was analyzed using metrics such as the percentage of moving components in the mechanism. Gender differences in scores on the spatial visualization test were significant, consistent with results of prior studies. A significant correlation between spatial reasoning and origami experience was found for male students tested. Most mechanism complexity criteria were not found to be significantly correlated with spatial-visual ability, although the correlation between the percentage of moving components and spatial test scores approached significance with a negative correlation. These results suggest that strong spatial-visual abilities may be used to simplify engineering design rather than increase its complexity.