A Course for the Development of 3-D Spatial Visualization Skills in Freshman Engineering Students

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Spatial visualization is known to be a valuable and often essential skill for engineers in all of the disciplines. The purpose of this project is to design a three credit course in three-dimensional spatial visualization and to develop the necessary materials from which the course can be taught. These materials will include a written textbook and a laboratory manual. The laboratory exercises will involve sketching and computer graphics and will also utilize the visualization capabilities of IDEAS software. Freshmen engineering students with weak 3-D visualization skills are the target audience for this course. Women have been found to be approximately three times less likely than men to have well-developed spatial visualization skills. Thus, it is expected that the proposed course will increase the accessibility of engineering studies to women. The goal of this course is to provide the prerequisite spatial visualization skills needed by students to succeed in their subsequent engineering design graphics courses and in their later study and work.