General Training of Spatial Abilities by Geometry Education in Augmented Reality

Geometry education has proven as one powerful means of improving spatial abilities, an important component of human intelligence. In the first part of this paper 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. 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 is the description of evaluation design including the test instruments, learning tasks and practical experiences with using our system for actual training of high school students. Results of a pre-study with spatial ability tests in high schools are presented. They point to interesting genderspecific differences of strategies when solving spatial ability tests, which have not been reported in literature before.