I am so not proficient when it comes to spatial reasoning. This makes sense to me because I can’t think of ever really practicing it as a child. I didn’t build with Legos or blocks, and I wasn’t really into jigsaw puzzles. Mostly, I read a lot. That means I’m generally a decent speller, but when I try to sew a face mask you will have to turn it right side in to make it right side out. Or something like that. Let’s just say my very un-straight stitches are very visible on the side of the material that you would normally want people to see. And, yes, that is with a sewing machine.
So, as I spend the second half of my century of life trying to visualize what comes naturally to everyone else in my family, I would like to re-iterate that spatial skills are pretty important, and aren’t really a big focus in most schools. Regular readers will know that this isn’t a new theme on this blog, and here are some past posts that I’ve done with other great resources: Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Puzzles, and a bunch of reviews of apps and games.
Today’s spatial reasoning resource would have been so fun to do with my engineering students. It comes to us from Mark Chubb (@MarkChubb3), who offers these One-Hole Punch Puzzles on his blog, Thinking Mathematically. I’ve seen puzzles like these on some aptitude tests, but usually the questions show how a paper was folded and punched, and you have to select from the multiple-choice the subsequent result when unfolded. In this hands-on twist, Chubb produces the results, and students have to use their own pieces of paper and one-hole punch tools to demonstrate where the paper must have been folded and punched.
In a pre-Covid class, we could have shared hole punchers and then had a huge confetti party. Sadly, this may not be an option for any teachers anytime soon, but I encourage home-schoolers, parents, and anyone who can’t sew a mask to give these puzzles a try.