Enhancing engineering drawing skills via fostering mental rotation processes
Kapil Kadam, Shitanshu Mishra, Anurag Deep, Sridhar Iyer
Abstract
Engineering Drawing (ED) is one of the fundamental courses for various engineering disciplines. However, first-year engineering undergraduates often face difficulties in learning and solving ED problems that require visualisation of 3D objects. Conventional and modern teaching methods do assist the teaching-learning of a subject but do not guarantee the elimination of the learning difficulties, specifically related to visualising spatial relationships. Mental rotation (MR) skills play a major role in learning such concepts, and students should be trained for the execution of MR processes. This paper presents a 3D visualisation tool-based training programme where students practice MR processes. The training guides students through hands-on tasks, coupled with the cognitive steps of MR. We investigate the effect of the training on improving 253 engineering undergraduates’ ED problem-solving performance by administering a pipeline of four research studies. Results show that the training successfully helps students in enhancing their ED problem-solving performance.