Informatics in Education

This study investigated the effects of 3D model building activities with block codes on students' spatial thinking and computational thinking skills. The study group consists of 5th grade students in a secondary school in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. For the study, a pretest-posttest control group was utilized within the experimental design. A total of 66 students participated, 23 in the experimental group and 43 in the control group. While the activities prepared on the Tinkercad platform were applied in the experimental group, the courses were taught using the traditional teaching method in the control group. The study covers a period of three-weeks in the course information technologies and software. The study used the computational thinking levels scale and spatial thinking test scales as data collection instruments. The data was analyzed using both descriptive statistics and independent samples t-tests. Based on the study findings, there were no significant differences observed in the levels of computational thinking skills levels and spatial thinking test scores between the experimental and control groups.

This review paper presents a systematic literature review on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in engineering education, and specifically in student’s spatial ability training, for the last decade. Researchers have explored the benefits of AR, and its application has been of increasing interest in all levels of education. Engineering students tend to have difficulties in acquiring visualization skills, and hence, AR is gaining momentum in enhancing students’ learning achievements. This paper aims to present valuable information to researchers, tutors and software developers of learning technology systems concerning the advantages and limitations of AR in spatial ability training, the incorporation of adaptivity and personalization in AR applications as well as the aspects of spatial ability having been evaluated using AR and the prevalent evaluation methods for AR applications. To this direction, a total of thirty-two (32) studies were reviewed, having been published since 2010. The findings reveal an increase in the number of studies during the last three years. One major conclusion is the improvement of learners’ spatial ability using AR in educational settings, and the noted challenge is the need for more learning content. One research gap that has been identified is the lack of personalization in the developed applications, offering space for future research. Concluding, this area is under-researched, and thus, there is scope for a lot of improvement.

Issues related to 3d turtle's navigation and geometrical figures' manipulation in the simulated 3d space of a newly developed computational environment, MaLT, are reported and discussed here. The joint use of meaningful formalism and the dynamic manipulation of graphically represented 3d figures seem to offer new resources and to pose new challenges as far as geometrical activities and construction of meanings are concerned, which are strongly related to the representational infrastructure of MaLT.