Abstract:

Nowadays, we are moving more and more away from the verbal to the visual perception of the world and this trend is inevitably reflected in the innovation of teaching resources at all levels of education. A child’s cognitive potential cannot be fully developed without the support of school education, so motivating solid geometric lessons is becoming increasingly important. Training in solid geometry problem solving has wide connections also with visual art and perception of space around us, thus it creates a substantial basis for constructing and transforming visual mental images. Our research focuses on this broad connection using different creative working environments for achieving a higher level of spatial skills in 10-11-year old children. In the article, we analyse the relationship between the performance of pupils in solid geometry problems and in tasks reduced into plane geometry problems. The pre-testing of 65 pupils from 3 primary schools took place at the beginning of the school year 2019/20 with an international standardised test for creative thinking and a spatial skill test for 5th grade. During the experiment, the geometric working environment is gradually widened from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional space. Students create geometric patterns according to given rules from flat solids (solve a plane geometry problem by manipulation), then reduce a spatial problem into a plane problem by projection (using top view and side view), and finally, they deal with a mental rotation problem in space. During the research, we combined different methods, specifically observation, semi-structured interview, and action research. The evaluation contains a global comparison as well as an analysis of students´ individual results.

Keywords:

Creative thinking, problem-solving, spatial skills, solid geometry, primary education, geometry teaching.