Why are spatial reasoning skills important for children?

A representation of traditional 3D mental rotation tests created in Flock XR

Spatial reasoning skills are increasingly being recognised as important for children in primary and secondary education. Spatial reasoning is how children understand and interact with their environment in the physical world, and also in digital and hybrid spaces.

When I created the Flock XR 3D creation tool, I was focussed on supporting the development of computing skills in an engaging and relevant context. It quickly became clear that spatial reasoning is necessary in Flock XR to design 3D worlds that change over time, and that the tool offers a way of teaching spatial reasoning through 3D coding.

What is spatial reasoning?

Two examples, just from the UK, define spatial reasoning:

“Spatial reasoning is the understanding of how objects can move in a 3-dimensional world.” UK Department for Education

“Spatial reasoning is the ability to understand and visualise spatial properties of objects and spatial relations, including spatial properties of quantities. … Spatial reasoning involves many different aspects, including shape properties and structure of objects, composition and decomposition of shapes, position, direction, movement and rotation, symmetry, perspective-taking, navigation and scaling.” Royal Society’s expert panel on spatial reasoning

Why is spatial reasoning important?

Spatial reasoning is important because it underpins a wide range of cross-curricula learning. The Department for Education describes spatial thinking as “an important building block of mathematical thinking” and highlights the role of activities such as construction, puzzles, fitting objects together and talking about position and movement. 

The Royal Society’s expert panel on spatial reasoning makes a broader case. It links spatial reasoning with mathematics, data interpretation, everyday problem solving and STEM, and argues that children should have more opportunities to develop these skills across the curriculum. Importantly for computing education, the report specifically includes computing among the meaningful contexts in which spatial reasoning can be developed.

There is also growing evidence that spatial reasoning supports computing education. In recent work with 7- and 8-year-olds, Jack Parkinson and Quintin Cutts found that children who took part in spatial activities during maths lessons improved more on measures of computational thinking than a control group, even though they had not been explicitly taught computing. The result is especially interesting because it suggests that spatial activities may support some of the thinking used in computing from a young age, although it is too early to make strong claims about exactly why that improvement occurs.

Research has found connections between spatial reasoning and mathematics, science and later participation in STEM subjects and careers.

I co-authored an academic paper on computational spatial fluency which combines computational thinking with spatial reasoning.

Computational Spatial Fluency is the ability to encode spatial intent into executable behaviour within interactive three-dimensional making environments. It focuses on the design of spatial systems whose behaviour emerges through computational processes, where spatial relations are constructed, tested, and refined over time.

We argue that computational spatial fluency can be developed through making projects in creative 3D environments such as Flock XR, and that accessibility must be treated as foundational.

Importantly, spatial skills are not fixed. A large review of spatial training studies found that they can improve with practice. In engineering education, Sheryl Sorby and colleagues have also found that students with weaker spatial skills, especially women, can benefit from targeted spatial training, with encouraging links to persistence and performance in engineering.

Why am I interested in spatial reasoning?

I became interested in spatial reasoning for children for several reasons:

1. I’m the creator of the Flock XR 3D coding and modelling tool. Creating in 3D requires and develops spatial reasoning skills.
2. Research has shown that improving spatial reasoning improves success in STEM subjects including computing. Research has also shown that girls perform worse on many spatial reasoning tasks. Other groups also underperform on traditional tests including those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I’m particularly interested in diversity, equity and inclusion in tech so this is a big concern.
3. Spatial computing is gaining support in industry with applications such as urban planning, fashion, games and immersive experiences, simulations and digital twins of real world systems. The next frontier of AI is spatial intelligence which requires AI to reason about 3D space.
4. I’m a supporter of constructionist approaches to computing education where children develop skills by creating projects. Seymour Papert developed constructionism and was an advocate of body syntonic reasoning which suggests that children can best program computers when they relate movement to their own bodies.
5. I have very poor spatial reasoning skills. I find it very difficult to put myself in the position of an onscreen character or a floor robot unless I can actually align myself with them. I’m very bad at many computing lessons designed for 5 year olds. I’m therefore concerned that poor spatial reasoning might be presumed to imply poor computing skills.

At this point you might reasonably be wondering how on earth I came to develop a 3D creation tool. And whether girls' weaker spatial reasoning skills on average (according to traditional spatial skills tests) might disadvantage them when creating in 3D.

I’m going to go into these topics in more detail in future articles. But in short, my own lack of spatial skills helps me to build a tool that is accessible to young people who don’t have strong spatial skills. And, girls, on average, might just have different spatial skills to boys and giving them a spatially-rich environment that is meaningful to them allows them to develop their skills naturally rather than trying to train them into a different cognitive profile.

Flock XR develops spatial reasoning alongside computational thinking

We don't need to justify spatial reasoning only because it might predict later success in STEM. Spatial reasoning is useful in its own right. Developing spatial thinking skills can be part of meaningful creative computational work, with tools that support different learners as they do it. If that also helps children with later learning in science, technology, engineering or maths, that is a wonderful additional benefit. But it doesn’t need to be the reason we do it.

Not every future pathway is narrowly STEM. Children who enjoy creating in 3D may go on to games, animation, digital fashion, architecture, virtual production or other creative technology where technical, spatial and artistic strengths are mixed in different ways. There is no single cognitive profile that everyone needs to succeed.

Children use spatial reasoning to understand and create in the world around them. It matters when they build, design, navigate, work with models, create games and make things in 3D.

Flock XR gives children repeated opportunities to use those skills while they are programming. They think about position, direction, scale, movement, perspective and how objects relate to one another, alongside ideas such as sequence, events, variables and behaviour. This is well aligned with the Royal Society's recommendations to integrate spatial reasoning into the curriculum across subjects such as Design & Technlogy and Computing. 

We focus on developing computational spatial fluency as the ability to make 3D projects that involve 3D modelling and coding in 3D spaces. We follow a universal design for learning (UDL) approach of supporting variability in learners and offering different ways to achieve goals.

Creating 3D projects in Flock XR gives plenty of natural oppoertunities to develop spatial reasoning skills in motivating contexts, along with computational thinking skills. 

Try Flock XR (the tool is free)