The Effects of Using Google SketchUp on the Mental Rotation Skills of Eighth Grade Students

AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of Google SketchUp, which is a computer aided design (CAD) software, on the Mental Rotation Skills of eighth grade students. For this purpose, in the spring semester of the 2011-2012 academic year, a treatment was conducted with 62 students comprised of 8A and 8B classes in the GSD Education Foundation Bahcelievler Primary School during the six weeks. The study was carried out in accordance with a quasi-experimental research with pretest and posttest design. The "Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test" was used to determine mental rotation skills of the students, participating the research study, as a pretest and posttest. When pretest results examined with independent samples t-test, a significant difference was found in favor of the class 8B (x8A = 5.42 x8B = 8.45 t(60)=3.62, p . 01). During the four weeks, the students in the control group tried to draw the different view of unit cube models developed by researchers on an isometric paper. In the same duration, the students in the experimental group tried to draw same models with the help of Google SketchUp software. At the end of the four weeks, the Mental Rotation Test was re-conducted for participants as a posttest. Although the increase in the mean scores of mental rotation test is higher in the experimental group, the ANCOVA results revealed that, there is no significant difference between the mean scores of the Mental Rotation Test of the experimental and control groups (F(1-59)=. 309, p . 05). Key WordsSpatial Ability, Mental Rotation, Google Sketchup, Concrete Objects, Manipulative.Understanding the positions and the relationships between the objects, and reposition and visualize the views from different angles of these objects mentally is an extremely important skill for human being. Although this skill is referred to the various names in literature, it is commonly called as "Spatial Skill". Spatial skills are highly essential to solve various issues in our daily life, from organizing furniture to parking a car, from landscaping garden to taking photos.There are many different definitions of spatial skill or spatial ability in the literature. Linn and Petersen (1985) defined spatial ability as a general skill for representing, transforming, generating and recalling the symbolic, non-linguistic information. According to the Tartre (1990) spatial skills are mental skills concerned with understanding, manipulating, re-organizing or interpreting the relations visually. Spatial ability may be defined as the ability to generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images (Lohman, 1996). Spatial ability divides three factors: [1] spatial perception, the ability to determine spatial relations with respect to the orientation of their own bodies [2] mental rotation, the ability to rotate a two or three dimensional shape rapidly and accurately, and [3] spatial visualization, the ability to manipulation of spatially presented information (Linn & Petersen). Spatial ability is one of the reasoning skills that is a capability of visualization the three dimensional objects, imagine different perspectives, and comprehend the relations between objects (Erkoc & Erkoc, 2012). Spatial abilities are valuable in our everyday life (driving, taking photos, playing computer games, etc.), in many professions (architecture, engineering, music, piloting, etc.) and in the scientific branches (mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, etc.) (Kurtulus, 2011; Yurt & Sunbul, 2012). Many studies have shown that spatial skills can be improved by training and learning with appropriate materials and activities (Burnett & Lane, 1980; Ben-Chaim, Lappan, & Houang, 1988; Olkun, 2003; Rafi, Samsudin, & Ismail, 2006; Rafi, Samsudin, & Said, 2008; Kurtulus, 2011; Yildiz & Tuzun, 2011). Improving the spatial skills of students is one of the roles of geometry course activities (Olkun). …