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 regardless of the socioeconomic status of the parents. 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 1.600 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 complete. The task groups are designed in such a way that they can be integrated directly into teaching and learning and promote many facets of spatial thinking.
The task groups of the first six areas (VI, FC, PS, TS, OC, and DY) contain 20 to 30 tasks (duration: 15 min) and are especially recommended for students from the age of 7 [Sample tasks].
The task groups of the other four areas (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:
The first six basic routines of spatial thinking were used as the scientific basis for the basic task groups. These basic practices are Visualization (VI), Form Constancy (FC), Position in Space (PS), Transformations in Space (TS), Object Combinations (OC), and Dynamics (DY).
The task groups with higher difficulty 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 ten areas of spatial thinking:
Visualization, Form Constancy, Position in Space, Transformations in Space, Object Combinations, Dynamics, Spatial Visualization, Spatial Relations, Mental Rotation, and Spatial Orientation.
More information on both models are available at geometriedidaktik.at in the 'Spatial Thinking' section.

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 University of Salzburg and the International Training Network SellSTEM (an EU-funded international project of 10 European universities and further international project partners). The RIF 3.0 website represents an enhancement of the website RIF 2.0. Among other things, around 900 new tasks were developed and integrated into numerous new task groups specifically for students aged 7 and above. 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 (once per class)
2) Activating task groups by the educator (always only one at a time)
3) Starting the activated task group by the student
4) Retrieving the class master data and class results by the educator and start again from step 2.

The main areas of RIF 3.0 are color coded