Strategies, interests, and challenges in a spatial problem solving in different scenarios

This study aims to investigate student spatial reasoning, thinking, strategies, interests, and challenges across four different countries in the context of collaborative group problem solving. The researchers used a problem solving scenario with groups of students that involved painting the outside of a cube, which was composed of 216 cubes (6 × 6 × 6). the four countries, findings were mostly consistent among the student collaborative groups with some variation of problem solving strategies employed. One challenge encountered across the research sites was student understanding of what the problem was asking. Overall, students were observed to be engaged and interested in this spatial reasoning problem solving scenario with some students expressing interest in having to visualize the exterior and interior cubes for the problem they were required to solve.