Information for Educators

Mission Statement

The mission of the team of developers of this website is to provide high quality education for spatial thinking for free for everyone, no matter where students are located around the world and no matter how many money their parents earn. With this platform we - a team of about 30 geometry experts and students - want to made a contribution to fostering STEM education around the world, because we see in many studies in a very impressive way, that spatial thinking skills are one the key abilities to be able to work successfully in the STEM field.
Therefore, this website offers extensive training and diagnostic tools in the form of various task groups with more than 1.500 included tasks for students of primary and secondary schools as well as students from universities. All the material of this website can be used freely. With the help of the tasks in all the task groups one can train and diagnose the spatial thinking skills from the age of 7-99 years in a variety of playful and scientifically based ways.

The task groups

All task groups consist of 20 to 60 consecutive, interactive tasks that take between 15 and 45 minutes to solve. The task groups are designed in such a way that they can be integrated directly into the lessons and many facets of spatial thinking can be trained and diagnosed in a playful way.
Each of the task groups of the categories 1 to 5 (VI, FC, PS, TS and OC) contain 30 tasks (duration: 15 min) and are especially recommended for students from the age of 7 [Sample tasks].
Each of the task groups of the categories 6 to 9 (SV, SR, MR, and SO) are available in two lengths and are recommended for students 12 years and older [Sample tasks]:
1) Short task groups: Between 20 and 30 tasks per task group (duration: 15 to 20 min)
2) Long task groups: Between 40 and 60 tasks per task group (duration: 30 to 45 min)

The scientific embedding

The following two models serve as the scientific framework for the task groups:
For the basic task groups in categories 1 to 5, the first five basic practices of spatial thinking were used as a scientific basis. These basic practices are Visualization (VI), Form Constancy (FC), Position in Space (PS), Transformations in Space (TS), and Object Combinations (OC).
The task groups with higher difficulty of categories 6 to 9 are structured according to the model of spatial ability, which identifies four subcomponents of this intelligence facet. The four subcomponents are Spatial Visualization (SV), Spatial Relations (SR), Mental Rotation (MR), and Spatial Orientation (SO).
Thus, RIF 3.0 includes the following nine areas of spatial thinking:
Visualization, Form Constancy, Position in Space, Transformations in Space, Object Combinations, Spatial Visualization, Spatial Relations, Mental Rotation, and Spatial Orientation.
More information on both models are available at geometriedidaktik.at in the 'Spatial Thinking' section (in progress).

The RIF 3.0 project

The project RaumIntelligenzFörderung 3.0 (RIF 3.0) is a cooperative project of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Didaktische Innovation für Geometrie, the Research Group for Didactics of Mathematics at the Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg and the International Training Network SellSTEM (an EU-funded international project of 10 European universities and further project partners). The RIF 3.0 website represents an enhancement of the website RIF 2.0. Among other things, about 750 new tasks in numerous new task groups were developed and integrated especially for students from the age of 7 to 13 years. In addition, the website has a totally new design that automatically adapts to various screen formats and can therefore be used on a wide range of digital devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones, ...) and the use is possible in the languages English, German and Spanish.
The numerous task groups on this website are available to all users for free for training and diagnostic purposes.

The logic behind RIF 3.0

The logical workflow with this website includes the following four steps:
1. Creating of a class by the educator
2. Activating a task group by the educator
3. Starting the activated task group by the student
4. Retrieving the class master data and class results by the educator.

The four areas of RIF 3.0 are color coded