Improving Spatial Abilities by Geometry Education in Augmented Reality - Application and Evaluation Design

In the first part we summarize our development of a system that uses collaborative augmented reality as a medium for teaching, and uses 3D dynamic geometry to facilitate mathematics and geometry education. Geometry education has proven as one powerful means of improving spatial abilities, an important component of human intelligence. A number of training studies have shown the usefulness of virtual reality (VR) in training spatial ability. Our immersive collaborative educational application, specifically developed for geometry education, serves as the basis of a comprehensive evaluation study regarding its efficacy in training spatial abilities. The main contribution of this paper is the description of evaluation design including the test instruments, learning tasks and practical experiences with using our system for actual teaching of high school students. Preliminary results of spatial ability tests in high schools are presented. They point to an interesting aspect of gender differences which has not been reported in literature before.