Improving young adults' spatial skills using a videogame about paper folding actions: A pre-post analysis

Spatial reasoning is the ability to imagine objects and their relationships to solve problems. It is present in daily activities and is strongly related to mathematics ability, being a predictor variable in success in STEM disciplines. Recent studies have shown that students with limited spatial abilities tend to underperform in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and to avoid those fields of studies at college. However, some studies have shown that spatial reasoning can be trained at all ages through interactive videogames. One type of spatial reasoning is spatial visualization, which is defined as the ability to mentally transform the configuration of the parts of an object into other arrangements. Spatial visualization can be measured by the Paper Folding Test. The aim of this paper is to study whether spatial visualization, measured with a paper-folding-and-hole-punching test, can be enhanced with the Paper Folding Game. We designed a pre-post study with a control group, in which 40 young adult subjects were trained with the experimental videogame. The results reveal that participants have answered statistically significantly more correct items and fewer committed errors after the training with the Paper Folding Game, in comparison with the active control group. Those results support the idea that spatial reasoning can be trained with educational videogames.