Spatial Learning with Geospatial Technologies

Every person has been lost or has had difficulties with reading or understanding a map at some point of his or her life. Spatial competencies, such as orientation or map-reading, are fundamental in human cognition and of highest importance for our daily lives. Their development is highly individual. Spatial learning is the process of gaining these competencies and takes place through experience but also in educational contexts. Within the last decades, digital technologies became an inherent part of our daily lives. In learning and especially primary and secondary education, they play a comparably smaller role, although their importance is constantly growing. Technologies to support spatial learning still are a niche and usually are not tailored for this purpose. In this work we try to solve the challenge of effectively supporting spatial learning with tailor-made geospatial technologies, overcoming individual differences, using motivating and novel interaction mechanisms and proving its transferability to learning and teaching practice. We have designed tasks to train spatial competencies, such as orientation and map-reading in educational contexts and integrated them into custom map-based systems with game elements for different mobile platforms. To measure effects on spatial learning we have evaluated the performance of the tasks (map reading, orientation) and the spatial abilities of the participants. The empirical studies with different learning groups focused on primary school children with cross-cultural backgrounds and consisted of pre- and post-condition spatial ability tests, such as the Mental-Rotation-Test, the Water-Level-Task, the Santa Barbara Perspective Taking Test and the drawing of Sketch Maps. We have found improvements in mental rotation and sketch map perspective after a short training condition. Also, individual differences in culture and gender could be decreased for the experimental group. A lack of usability of user interfaces in the educational context is often a reason for the technologies not being used in education. Teachers - still often novice and skeptical users - often decide not to involve a technology into teaching practice, if its use is too complicated and too time-consuming in preparation. Therefore we have developed systems with better usable interaction mechanisms to be used in educational contexts and evaluated them in terms of their usability with young or novice users (e.g. teachers). Based on the results we have implemented ways to integrate geospatial technologies into learning and teaching practice. We performed and evaluated courses, workshops and teacher trainings in primary and high schools, concentrating on geography education and could prove a successful and motivating use of the technologies. We could identify a key role of teacher trainings as a successful mean to bridge the gap of missing curricular integration of geospatial technologies in geography education. In this research, we have explored and presented solutions for the support of spatial learning with geospatial technologies. We have shown that it is crucial to consider cognitive and usability aspects in the design and development of systems for the educational context. The results showed a successful integration of the technologies into teaching practice. We have been able to change habits in the regional community of educators and learners, influence curricular decisions for future geography teacher education and design a vision for successful spatial learning with geospatial technologies.