Using LEGO to test children's ability to visualize and rotate 3D shapes in space:
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a test that uses children’s ability to assemble LEGO pieces to assess their spatial visualization ability. Spatial visualization is the ability to visualize 3D shapes in one’s mind, which is tied to increased GPAs and graduation rates in STEM college students.
At the college level, a widely used assessment is the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations, or PSVT:R, which is a 20-minute timed test consisting of a series of multiple-choice questions that are geared towards students 13 and older. Van Den Einde and Delson wanted to develop an assessment that would be more suitable and engaging for students at lower grade levels. They turned to LEGO, which was designed with that younger age range in mind and is familiar to many children. To pass the test, students have to assemble a set of LEGO pieces into a specific shape, such as a whale or a small plane, while only being given a picture of the final shape but no step-by-step instructions. The time it takes students to build the correct solution is the metric used for assessment.
[...] In order to validate the test, the researchers had students in two freshman engineering graphics courses take both the LEGO assembly test and the PSVT:R. Students took the tests both at the beginning and end of the quarter. During the course, they were trained with the Spatial Viz app. Test results show a statistically significant correlation between outcomes on the LEGO test and the PSVT:R.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @12:17PM (2 children)
3D toy used to measure ability of younglings to do 3D things.
What a time to be alive...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @06:19PM
Really, where is the kickback from smart phone sales? Things simply can't be news these days without subsidies from the smart phone industry. Like "Study Shows Rectal Insertion of Smart Phone Decreases Gas Emissions - All Praise Smart Phones! And don't forget to get more alerts with our FREE streaming/news/malware app!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday June 22 2020, @08:01PM
It was a standard test for the draft here in Italy to create a given shape with blocks. There were 2 or three target shapes, the most difficult could be solved in, like, 40 seconds. The shape was 2d but you needed to flip blocks to succeed. More than spatial awareness it measured dexterity.
An earlier test was more into spatial awareness, used to involve a piece of paper, put on the forehead, and the instruction to write a phrase on it. It involves mirroring the writing and is quite fun.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @12:57PM (2 children)
We had wooden blocks which do not enforce alignment/attachment like Lego, and require careful placement to build towers--or face the reality of gravity. A few years later was Meccano/Erector that taught nuts&bolts (and not swallowing small parts).
I'm known for out of the box thinking and tolerance for many points of view. Where is the study that compares "analog" and "digital" toys during childhood?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @01:30PM (1 child)
>> Where is the study that compares "analog" and "digital" toys during childhood?
Yue Wang, Karl Yaffe, Terrence Blackwell, et al. "Association of Digital Toys in Childhood with Later Gender Abnormalities in Young Adults Including an Increased Risk of Transgenderism", JAMA Millennial Studies (DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2020.1623)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday June 22 2020, @08:03PM
>Including an Increased Risk of Transgenderism
If you had s/Risk of/Opportunity for/ I would have fallen for it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @02:08PM (5 children)
>> They turned to LEGO, which was designed with that younger age range in mind and is familiar to many children.
Poor children (BIPOC overrepresented) are less likely to have access to overpriced LEGO sets in childhood, so they won't have a chance to practice for these exams. As a result, fewer BIPOC students get into engineering. Systemic racism at its worst, but no surprise since the study is from UCSD. Since Californian universities have committed to reinstate affirmative action the workaround will be to redo this study replacing LEGO with more familiar 3D childrens toys like crack vials and dead rats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @02:11PM
BIPOC children get dead rats to play with now? Spoiled rotten... when I was a child, we had to kill our own rats or we went without.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @03:39PM (2 children)
Dude, LEGO was always on the more expensive side. That's the price to pay for having the precision and that the thing holds together. (Compare to cheap chinese clones). As a kid, I remember saving money for that one specific set for couple of months and then getting it. The joy was in the chase, in getting it, in playing with it and also in the quality. Not quantity. We're talking post-soviet block european country. Taught me planning, saving money, value of money and focus. I say LEGO is doing it right!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:02PM
They were, a large part of why is that the precision on them was much better than on the knock offs. Take bricks from pretty much any set back to the earliest plastic ones and they all fit together. The colors are probably still just as good as they were. The sets I have going back to the '80s are more or less just as good as they were when new and show no signs of discoloration or deterioration.
Interestingly, as they've automated more and more of the process, the prices seem to have largely stagnated, meaning that you're paying more or less the same amount now that you were decades ago. The main thing that's changed, is that the upper limit on the number of pieces in a set is much higher than it used to be. Some of those sets have thousands of pieces.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday June 22 2020, @08:06PM
In Soviet Russia, bloc blocks YOU!!!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @06:24PM
And yet they will still have overpriced smartphones.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 21 2020, @02:54PM (1 child)
Didn't this use to be, or perhaps still is, a core part of (or subset of) intelligence testing -- visual spatial testing. You get a drawn a picture of a shape and then they tell you to rotate it say X degrees along some axis and then they wonder what it will look like and you are offered a few choices or you are supposed to draw it yourself. They assume symmetry so it's not like completely different on the backside. It might have fallen out of favor tho since one of the core results was that men in general was a lot better at it then women.
This is just part of the all things old become new if you just slap some new tech on top of it. I guess we just didn't have the fancy LEGO models that the youth of today have with all their 3D models and VR. Get away from my lawn!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:09PM
That test never did a very good job of testing visualization. It's entirely possible to ace that section without the ability to visualize and without cheating. It tests the visual-spatial sketchpad, and there are different ways in which people manage to do it. Most people visualize, but there's some folks, myself included, that convert things over to motions or a series of directions and pass it like that.
One of the issues that crops up in assessment is when people are able to pass despite not having the ability that the test question is supposed to be measuring. A test item like that is worthless as it can't predictably measure the intended ability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @03:21PM (1 child)
for me "tests for kids" always sounds funny.
it kindda implies that if you grow up (not a kid anymore) you will somehow, magically solve the test "in your sleep" just because of virtue of growing up.
secondly "tests for kids" gives me a bad feeling because, you know, you're testing people early on so the "existing machinary of humankind" that was build by pre-generation (before you were born) and needs upkeep, knows where the "kid" will be best placed as a biological drone -kog ...
or maybe, pulling on the money-purse string emotion of the parents, the "kid test" is like a performance indicator for their "investment" and will draw enough ...uhm...errr... sponsorship to be finan... err... performed.
give "kids" normal tests. they fail? nevermind, at least they now know what's coming ... but maybe it's "learn alot but not too much": comply!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:13PM
The problem with testing for adults it that it's far more likely that adults have developed other ways of solving problems that are not related to the skill or ability that the test intends to test. There's also a much wider range of abilities as adults than there is for kids. It's one of the reasons why IQ tests are even less commonly given to adults as it's much, much harder to test the innate abilities of adults due to life history and uneven access to education.
There's also far less utility as adults are largely on some sort of a trajectory in life, one that's much harder to change than it is in kids. Whereas kids being encouraged to look at careers that better suit their abilities and interests can be helpful, doing so with adults is much more expensive and time-consuming.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @03:28PM (4 children)
Back in the day, LEGO was a box of mostly generic bricks. Main toy was let's say a car with full-fledged walkthrough how to build it. With three more pictures on the other side what could be still built with the set and maybe some pieces would remain unused. Now, I've got two kids now, and I've noticed couple of years ago that the pieces are becoming specialised mono-blocks and the additional design pictures disappeared from the box. What I'm trying to say, back in the day, the spacial awareness was a part of the toy and now they're are measuring if kids are still able to do it, when they removed it? Measuring speed of the race to the bottom? Now get of my lawn! :-)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @04:04PM
You misunderstood the test. The way it works is they show the test subject children the latest Star Wars Mega LEGO set, and see how quickly they can manipulate their parents into buying it for them. It combines Californian's love of consumption with USDC's love of funding from LEGO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @04:06PM
Only a couple of years ago? It's been going on for a decade or two now.
Also remember to get the correctly gendered legos. We can't have the little ones getting the idea that gender should not imply segregation, and especially girls might grow up ignorant of the danger of novel, vaccine-resistant boy cooties lurking in languages like C/C++ instead of eternally waiting for the innovation of "feminist" programming languages.
Finally, if they git gud at lego, this will help us socially isolate the kids into "gifted" programs. That will make sure they grow up to be incels (MRAs and right-wing pseudo-feminists) who wouldn't ever imagine organizing into a professional association to resist corporate control of the relevant useful arts. Imagine what would happen if all those tech dweebs decided to throw the javascript cowboys and Lennart Poetterings out of software development and took back control of W3C!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:16PM (1 child)
From what I understand there was a period where they swayed way towards having just about every set have a few specialty bricks that were only available in a small number of sets. Since then, they've pared it back a ton because it wasn't economically feasible to have all these blocks that are essentially one-offs in terms of production costs.
That being said, the sets I've mostly used were from the '80s and '90s, I mostly just see the ones that my nephew has and they do have markedly more special pieces, even though Lego has been working to reduce the numbers in sets to keep production costs to something reasonable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:53AM
To get any of those old-style lego pieces anymore. I've actually seen Fry's Electronics in California carrying them, although I didn't pick up a set. The second generation 'beveled' cockpits from the later plane and space sets are only available via the Chinese market now, and only in the glassic blue glass color. You can't find any of the cooler ones like the yellow, green or neon orange cockpits that were available in the blacktron, megatron and ice planet sets of the early to mid 90s anymore. So many great pieces are rarely available in the color and sizes people would actually want.