TeachSpatial: A Portal to Instructional Resources on Spatial Concepts for STEM Education

位于圣巴巴拉的加州大学（UCSB）的研究人员正在解决美国教育中的一个盲点。在数字时代，越来越多地以地图，图表和示意图的形式直观地表示信息，许多教育工作者现在认识到需要补充传统的数字/语言素养，强调空间思维。空间思维将对距离、方向、比例和模式识别等概念的理解与有效使用视觉表示和空间技术（如全球定位系统和地理信息系统）相结合，以解决社会问题和促进科学发展，该项目正在通过一个新的门户网站（http：//www.example.com）解决将空间思维纳入教育的需要。teachspatial.org TeachSpatial是一个小额赠款的国家科学数字图书馆（NSDL）路径项目，旨在促进教育工作者之间的空间素养的讨论，并提供相关的NSDL学习资源的指导访问，以帮助教师将空间思维融入科学和数学学科的课程。TeachSpatial项目明确了中学现有科学和数学标准中隐含的空间学习目标，并记录了新本科生掌握空间概念的基线。TeachSpatial使教师能够作为空间思维的先驱在NSDL中找到资源（课程大纲，练习，链接数据集和示例应用程序），访问和贡献促进空间思维和空间计算推理的学习模块，交流经验和教学策略，并提供特定学习资源的评估。

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) are addressing a blind-spot in American education. In a digital era that increasingly represents information visually as maps, graphs, and schematic images, many educators now recognize the need to complement traditional numerical/verbal literacy with an emphasis on spatial thinking. Spatial thinking integrates an understanding of concepts, such as distance, direction, scale, and pattern recognition, with the effective use of visual representations and spatial technologies, such as GPS and geographic information systems (GIS), to solve societal problems and to advance science.This project is addressing the need to embed spatial thinking in education with a new portal(http://teachspatial.org). TeachSpatial is a small-grant National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathways project that promotes discussion of spatial literacy among educators and provides guided access to relevant NSDL learning resources to help teachers integrate spatial thinking into course curricula for science and math-based disciplines. The TeachSpatial project is making explicit those spatial learning objectives that are implicit in existing science and math standards at the secondary level and is documenting a baseline for mastery of spatial concepts by new undergraduates. TeachSpatial is enabling instructors working as pioneers for spatial thinking to find resources (course syllabi, exercises, linked datasets, and exemplar applications) within NSDL, to access and contribute learning modules that promote spatial thinking and spatial computational reasoning, to exchange experiences and pedagogical strategies, and to offer evaluations of specific learning resources.