IW 2022: Spatial Skills

INCOSE IW 2022 PANEL: Remedial Spatial Education for current college students in engineering and related fields - 3 professor’s perspectives and methods

Spatial skills are 'implied everywhere and yet taught nowhere' summarized a 2008 National Academy of Science report. No Child Left Behind’s drive to improve verbal and math skills eviscerated arts, music, PE classes — removing the A from STEAM — coinciding with kids growing up on flat screens and tablets wrought disaster, proving how crucial drawing, 3D and kinetic awareness are to the imagination itself. How can we remedy this new generation of flat thinking college kids entering highly 3D fields like engineering and its sister architecture, design, and planning disciplines?

Following last years’ panel of spatial researchers, Alex Wolf invites faculty practicing today to discuss what this generation of college students are facing in up-skilling their 3D abilities, how their preK-12 play formats contributed compared to prior students, and how early childhood play modalities give a leg up to the current crop of students who missed them.

Familiarity with this issue is crucial to those who expect schools to prepare engineers for the future, and is requiring a real shift in repairing the preponderance of verbal and math subjects to the detriment of spatial skill building for all students, not just those going into STEAM.

PANELISTS

Dartmouth Engineering professor Vicki V. May, who ran a seminal class with David Macaulay using his The Way Things Work methods (paper), joins along with George Stiny MIT Architecture professor, whose Shape Grammars inform Froebel block training for entering students to standardize their 2D to 3D to 2D skills, and artist Michael Oatman, Rensselaer Polytechnic Architecture professor who draws on art and architecture analog methods to broaden the 3D and 4D imaginations of students raised on screens.

9 minute FroebelUSA Scott’s documentary feat. G Stiny https://vimeo.com/332075430/09c2c9dfc1

Vicki V. May

https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/community/faculty/vicki-may

George Stiny

https://architecture.mit.edu/faculty/george-stiny

Michael Oatman

https://www.arch.rpi.edu/2011/10/oatman-michael/

BIO Michael James Oatman was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1964. He lives and works in Troy, NY where he has teaches in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His installations, collages and videos are composed of thousands of components, and he refers to his practice as "the poetic interpretation of documents."

Trained as a painter at RISD and the University of Albany, he has made over 100 site-specific installations, public works and curatorial projects. Oatman's long-term installation, "all utopias fell" has been on view at MASSMoCA since 2010, and his mid-career survey was presented at the Tang Museum in 2005. In that same year he was the recipient of the Nancy Graves Prize. For over 35 years Oatman has collaborated with his students and parents(Gordon Oatman 1937-2018 & Shirley Oatman 1937-2019) under the moniker of Falling Anvil Studios. Oatman has taught at Harvard, UVM, St. Michael's College, Vermont College, NHIA and was a frequent visiting critic at RISD from 1987-2014.

He was the first artist invited to work from the personal archive of astronaut Neil Armstrong, resulting in the 2019 project, "My Father, Neil Armstrong, My Mother, The Moon." He is currently at work on several large-scale installations related to ongoing themes of eugenics, space exploration, and the colonial origins of museum culture.