The University of Canberra’s new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paddy Nixon, dropped by the SERC studio yesterday to talk about our research projects.
We started the visit with a high-level overview of SERC, including the research funding we have attracted since SERC was established in 2014.
Then it was time to introduce the VC to some of our projects.
The first project we discussed was Government Partnerships for Development (GPFD). This project took place in Indonesia, aiming to improve the quality of teaching and learning in mathematics classrooms, and promote mathematics engagement and learning opportunities for disadvantaged communities.
Second in line was an overview of three ARC Discovery projects discussing the impacts of spatial reasoning on mathematics teaching and learning.
Here we talked about the influence of spatial reasoning on primary and secondary school mathematics for students across a range of socioeconomical circumstances and geographical locations.
Powerful key findings from these projects demonstrate that spatial skills transfer to mathematical performance, that there is an impact for mathematics well beyond geometry, and that there is also a transfer to other spatial tasks.
Next it was time to meet Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) and play one of the children’s apps: Location and Arrangement.
The VC was shown a demonstration of the ‘Playground’ activity where children can design their own playground and then guess which ELSA character took a photo of another character. The game builds children’s spatial awareness and perspective-taking ability.
We also talked to the VC about ELSA’s data analytics backend and its wide-ranging capabilities to collect and interrogate large datasets for research purposes.
Wrapping up the VC’s visit to SERC, it was time to talk about the lab space. Due to the implications of COVID-19, this space hasn’t been utilised to its full potential yet. However, in the future we hope we can engage children in a number of spatial activities—such as mental rotation and block play—and observe how they play and interact with various objects.
We also talked to the VC about our eye-tracker software and how we plan to use this in the future to help us, for example, identify the areas of a screen that a child is looking at when completing an activity.
2020 has been a difficult year for higher education, with the sector facing new and complex challenges, so we greatly appreciate the VC taking time out to get familiar with our research centre. We look forward to seeing you again soon, VC.