Investigating the role of spatial thinking in children’s design ideation through an open-ended design-by-analogy challenge

Spatial thinking is ubiquitous in design. Design education across all age groups encompasses a range of spatially challenging activities, such as forming and modifying mental representations of ideas, and visualizing the scenarios of design prototypes being used. While extensive research has examined the cognitive processes of spatial...

Cognitive and embodied mapping of data: an examination of children’s spatial thinking in data physicalization

Understanding and effectively using visual representations is important to learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Various techniques to visualize information, such as two- and three-dimensional graphs, diagrams, and models, not only expand our capacity to work with different types of information but also actively...