Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Spatial Thinking: Location, Orientation, Rotation, and Reflection
John Gough
[Adapted loosely from Assessment and Reporting Directorate, 2001. Secondary Numeracy Assessment
Program (SNAP): Extended Response Task Marking Procedures: Year 7 and 8, 2001, New South Wales
Department of Education and Training (NSWDET), Sydney.]
1. Using a map. Here is a map, with a legend or key, explaining special symbols.
A. List four (4) places shown on the map, and give the mapreference for each.
(1) _______, ____ , (2) _______ , ____, (3) _______ , ____ , (4) _______ , ____ .
B. Draw X on the map to show the location of the public telephone, and Y to show the
railway station.
C. Give street directions to go from the EarnRoad Bridge (e.g. G15), to the Isley Road
(e.g. A 7). Include all relevant street names, and significant features along the route,
and give all right/left turns in these directions.
__________________
D. (a) How far is it from Millside railway station (K 7) to Fordton Post Office (B 8)?
(b) How far is it by road from the Old Barn to the Fordton Taxi stand?
Explain or show how this is worked out. ________________
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 2
E. You are standing at the edge of the forest on Piny Hill, with a wideangle view of
several map features. Name three visible things you can see which are represented by
symbols on the map, and give the map coordinates for each feature:
(1) _______, ____ , (2) _______, ____ , (2) _______, ____ .
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 3
2. Drawing Three Dimensional Block Objects
Here are five cubes, making a three dimensional object. Some of the cubes are labelled.
The cubes are presented in an isometric diagram.
(a). Draw the appearance of the object after you remove the cube labelled A.
(b). What if, instead of this, you remove only the cube labelled B?
(c). Instead of this, what will it look like if you remove only the cube labelled C?
(d). It is easy to change the object by placing a cube on top of the cube labelled B. Draw
what the diagram will look like when you do this.
Instead of removing cubes, to change what we are looking at, we can 'walk' around the
object. Here is what it looks like from 'behind' the Ccube.
Where is the face labelled C?
Where is the face labelled B?
(e). Draw labelled arrows to indicate the hidden labelled faces.
Now, imagine that you move around 'behind' the object, so that you are looking directly at
the back of the cube behind the Acube.
(f). Draw a diagram to show how the object looks from that position.
(g). Draw a diagram to show the object looking towards the righthand side of the Bface.
Imagine the five cubes shown above are all glued together. We lift the whole object and
turn it, so that the side labelled A now sits on the top of the object. Use a set of cubes to
show what the object now looks like.
(h). Draw the object after it has been rolled over this way.
What if we start with the object as it is shown above, but this time we lift the whole object
so that the Bface ends up at the top.
(i). Draw it.
(j) Here is a threedimensional rectangular object, with some of its faces marked. The
other sides are blank. Can you complete the twodimensional net for this object?
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 4
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 5
3. Drawing Rotations and Reflections
(a) Draw the letter R reflected by a mirror placed horizontally underneath.
(b) Draw the letter F reflected by a mirror placed vertically at the righthand side.
(c) Draw the letter L after it has been rotated 45 degrees anticlockwise, pivoting on the
bottomlefthand corner.
L
(d) Draw the same letter L after it has been rotated 45 degrees clockwise, pivoting on the
toprighthand corner.
Isometric Grid Paper
Isometric Dotty Paper
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 6
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 7
Where Am I? Making Maps, Reading Maps, and Scale Planning
John Gough
From the Mathematics Curriculum and Standards Framework II (CSF II, 2000):
Level 1 (to be achieved by the end of Prep, the first year of Primary school, about 6 years)
Space
1.2 Make and draw reasonable representations of simple shapes, e.g. triangle, square,
rectangle, circle (MAMA0102).
1.3 Copy reasonable representations of simple spatial pictures and patterns
(MAMA0103).
1.5 Use and understand simple everyday location words to follow and give an oral
direction, e.g. stand next to the door, state where an item is placed (MAMA0105).
1.6 Follow short paths on simple drawings and models, e.g. move a toy car along a toy
road on a floor mat (MAMA0106).
1.7 Represent parts of familiar environments by building models, e.g. build a path with
sticks and counters showing the road from home to school, use toys and simple
objects to make a small model environment such as a farmyard or the school
buildings and grounds (MAMA0107).
If teachers assume all (almost all) students can handle location, plan and map tasks after
one year of Primary schooling, the rest of the plansandmaps curriculum follows easily.
Consider these stages of experience:
• making and reading a house plan (a builder’s floor plan, or birdseyeview, as well as
sideviews), or the plan of the classroom, or the plan of the school building, or
school buildings and schoolyard; this naturally extends to making and reading
sketch plans of the local neighbourhood, including shopping centres, and street
plans
• making scale models of rooms and buildings (e.g. 1 centimetre representing 1 metre)
• working with scale diagrams of cars, planes, dinosaurs, and other interesting objects
• using a street directory map of a local or familiar environment
• using a street directory (or similar map) of an unfamiliar environment, linked with
planning for a class excursion to the place, and activities during the excursion
• using streetdirectory letternumber coordinates; then graphaxis coordinates; then
latitude and longitude
• compassbearings such as North and South; the global Poles, and the magnetic poles
• linking relatively smallscale flatmap skills with largescale globemap and
sphericalglobe skills
John Gough — Spatial Thinking Activities page 8
• globebased explanation of day and night, and timezones; the Earth’s tilt and the
explanation of seasons within a SolarSystemtype model
• learning about contour lines, sloping gradients (where a path cuts across several
contour lines), water courses, lookouts, coastlines, …
• working with map legends (e.g. different colors indicating different landuse,
geological and geographical features, different visual symbols representing different
features such as traffic signals, train stations, bridges, forest, swamp, …).