MathForest: A Tangible Collaborative Game for Developing Children’s Spatial Skills

Many children exhibit low spatial skills due to a lack of motivation and effective learning methods, which adversely affects their future performance in STEM fields. We designed MathForest, a tangible collaborative game, to cultivate spatial skills by encouraging children to communicate through spatial language. The MathForest system consists of an identification board, level cards, tangram and an iPad-based game. Participants work in pairs, leveraging their understanding of coordinate systems and geometric transformations to verbally describe or physically complete tangram puzzles. Finally, our user study demonstrated that learning collaboratively through the use of spatial language positively affects children’s development of spatial skills.