Building Spatial Awareness with Geometiles

By: Yana Mohanty, PhD

Spatial ability or visualization is essential in engineering and scientific fields. It is the skill of understanding where objects are in space in relation to each other and how they interact. Geometiles is a tool for children to develop spatial awareness either in a self-directed or teacher-directed way. Whichever way you use Geometiles, they give children an opportunity to develop resourcefulness and hone their problem solving skills.

A simple prompt like “build a house” will often set children on a path of discovering how shapes fit together in space without them even realizing. For example, this girl is building an enclosure for her animals.

Working with rectangles, she has figured out that the two halves of the “roof” needs to make an acute angle with each other. The next step is to stabilize the structure by finding a shape that will connect the two opposing walls or the two halves of the roof.

You can also use Geometiles in a more structured way as well. For example, you can ask students to build squares in as many different sizes as they can. This seemingly simple task requires students to think carefully about the shapes they have available to them, as well as the different ways in which these shapes can be combined.

You can take this activity one step further by having children build cubes using the various size squares they constructed. This is a particularly rewarding activity for children because it gives them an opportunity to work in groups (each group may create a side of a cube) and persevere in constructing the end product using everyone’s contribution. Here is an example of a large cube the students can build:

Whichever way you decide to structure (or unstructure) your lesson, children will get some valuable practice in spatial reasoning and problem solving.

Interested in getting Geometiles for your classroom? Shop here and download a free sample activity here to use with your students!

Yana Mohanty, Ph.D., is a math coach, former math lecturer at the University of California, San Diego and Palomar College, and inventor of Geometiles