About Spatial

Vision + spatial

In the Classroom

  • Schools lack spatial reasoning, a problem that must be addressed

    Spatial skills that humans of all ages require are urgently needing a jumpstart by more than just na2ure’s patternABC team and spatial researchers, and ESRI’s team and geospatial vision. na2ure is looking for multiple partners to boost awareness of the now amply research-based spatial and initial patternABC research and uses as the best available solution for now. While we need additional research to make evidence based educational models, we need research less and action more to start building awareness of what spatial researchers have known for decades, and now have in hand recently. Below are projects we have done so far with scant funding.

  • Starting in preschool

    For preschoolers, we designed a pilot for UNICEF, to test the pABC curriculum among under-resourced children in Tanzania in 2019. The resulting paper from Borzekowski et al, in 2022 helped bolster our claim of the need for separate spatial curriculum for preschools to Dr. Pia Britto, the then-director of Early Childhood Development at UNICEF.  The new Sustainable Development Goals (v 4.6) are due in 2030, and we maintain the need to include this curriculum. It is an arts-based approach popular with children and teachers, that uses lessons in identification, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional representation, four-dimensional embodied movement exercises and beyond the classroom in nature walks in the real world.

  • In K-12, secondary education, and PhD

    For K-12 students, the same modalities can grow in complexity and create a thruline for subjects across the curriculum from STEM, the arts, languages, dance and sports. The Collegiate School in Richmond, VA has been working on that integration since 2021. They are also our school partner on the Tools Competition which we won in 2023 to create a digital app alongside the analog cards in Learning Sciences.

    Universities have used the cards in engineering at U Calgary, and biomimicry/sustainability classes at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Alex Wolf is co-chair of the Natural Systems Working Group at INCOSE started by NASA’s George Studor, and is asked to present yearly within the group and at the International Workshop to explain with panelists how spatial learning is down in college students due to lack of classes in K-12, such that less than 10% of STEM-interested college-bound students are equipped for STEM coursework.

AI and Research

  • In AI and at NASA

    For AI, NASA Biocene group at the Glenn Research Center (GRC) incorporated the patternABC as a lens into the Periodic Table of Life (PeTaL) machine vision AI to identify all life on earth. The paper’s PI, Vikram Shyam is now a futurist at NASA Langley and we are in the process of the futurist team examining further visualization modules for NASA. 

    Recently, the graphic visualization lab at NASA GRC updated their new generative AI, BIDARA to include the patternABC. Shyam led the first two volume textbook on Biomimicry, and na2ure cofounders Vijal Parikh and Alex Wolf wrote the chapter on The Pattern Alphabet for the volume on Design, Material, and Habitats in 2022.

  • Our Research and Researchers 

    The patternABC is grant writing with David Uttal, Roberta Golinkoff, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek to several NSF and private foundations. Golinkoff’s post-doctoral student Amanda Delgado ran several studies with pABC, one resulting poster showed 4-5 year olds can see 84% of the pABC patterns, and another poster showed that growth patterns (explosion, spiral, branching) were the highest correlation to traditional spatial assessments in the same 4-5 years olds, much higher than traditional geometric shapes (circle, triangle, square) A pre-press paper from Delgado further shows that the growth row of the pABC in particular was a significant predictor of children’s spatial performance based on the Woodcock-Johnson Spatial Relations III test.

Next Steps

What does this spark for you as a reader at your organization?

We are working as fast as we can with the funding and personnel available to develop the next steps, including the app funded by the Tools Competition, and the curriculum, both of which were featured at The Collegiate School’s Education Collaborative in August 2024.

To move spatial learning ahead, much as Esri is with mapping and ArcGIS modules, we are seeking partners who can help in an assortment of ways. We believe the patternABC growth patterns in particular lend themselves to geographical visualizations, in mind,on paper, and in 3D apps. Dr. Uttal agrees that patterns are ubiquitous, and Dr. Britto says the patternABC is useful for not just teaching, but testing, and agrees spatial skills need their own learning within SDG 4.6.

Two core issues

We believe two core issues need immediate attention — the lack of a public awareness campaign, like Reading is Fundamental, and the creation of new core spatial tests for a variety of age milestones, as Uttal et al. call for in their recent article on the poor and inconsistent quality of spatial measures. We invite feedback on possible solutions and interest you may have to solve this mutual problem.

We'd like to hear from you!

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the Pattern Alphabet: pattern ABC

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