Some people may have very remarkable reading and writing abilities, but struggle with spatial awareness and may not be too comfortable with abstract reasoning concepts like spatial arrangements, patterns, orientations, and so on.

The problems related to reasoning are often called reverse dyslexia too, and its existence is totally undeniable. Researchers classify these as non-verbal learning difficulties (NVLD).  

It largely includes the inability to guess the right shape, size, weight, or placement of the things while visualizing their 3D formats. Thus, you may find people with these disorders to be having difficulties like:

• Inability to arrange things in the order of their size
• Inability to guess the speed of the ball coming to them, which means missing catches
• Inability to tell the location and the unintended place of any object
• They are stumbling upon things more than often despite being fully present at the site mentally as well as physically.

All these points at visual-spatial reasoning disorder; a book NVLD and Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in Children by Broitman, J., Melcher, M., Margolis, A., Davis, J.M. proposes spatial reasoning disorder as a subtype of NVLD.

As is evident that such skills need more practical learning, the students can be given options like manipulatives or games. Interestingly, many of the games that were previously played in classes and homes are available online. So, you can download these games to give something new and interesting to the students and replenish their repertoire of learning materials anytime you want.

6 games for improving your spatial reasoning skills

1. Shape Slicer 3D

Know the shape and orientation – while many other online spatial reasoning games leave the objective at this stage, this game moves further up and allows you to create the blocks, too, to fit into the puzzle. This game can rightly be called ‘spatial reasoning in action’ as you are utilizing your logic and thinking skills to slice the cubes off the block, and further use them in various jigsaw puzzles.

Slice the block, choose the slot, and fit! This is how you learn to understand the spatial aspects of any figure or pattern. Levels help you challenge yourself to various difficulties and tease your brain further. The feeling of satisfaction and zeal to learn more help you extract the best experience. Parents can also participate to promote collaborative learning.

App Link: Appstore

2. Piko’s Spatial Reasoning

Let young kids as little as four years old work on their spatial awareness and reasoning skills with this exciting app called Piko’s Spatial Reasoning. The app is a storehouse of exercises like building matching structures, creating mirror images, and removing extra blocks from 3D structures. As kids try their hands at manipulating blocks in different exercises, they improve their visual and spatial reasoning, problem-solving, and thinking skills.

Parents and teachers can easily create multiple profiles for their kids and students at school. With more than 300 exercises, kids will always have something new to work on. The game adjusts the difficulty level as per the child’s ability while providing enough challenge to encourage them to take a step further.

App Link: Playstore

3. Mental Rotation

As the name suggests, playing this game tests a person’s mental rotation skills. Visualizing different degrees of rotation of 2D and 3D images is possible when one applies mental rotation skills. These skills are related to the spatial ability of an individual, which includes spatial orientation and spatial reasoning.

Different structures made of dots appear on the screen, and players must identify the rotated image of the structure out of the three options provided. While the player takes time to select the correct answer, a timer notes the response time, which is then summarized at the end of the activity. While the game is suitable for kids and adults, it is also a good choice for the elderly, who tend to struggle with spatial skills with age.

App Link: Playstore

4.  Train your brain. Visuospatial

This app provides a visuospatial experience for all ages. It provides multiple gaming options like ones on puzzles and shapes, estimation of perimeter and lengths, symmetry-related activities like repeating symmetrical patterns, identification of 3D figures, etc. The daily stimulation of visuospatial senses through this app will go a long way in improving your spatial reasoning and has been developed and recommended by experts in neuropsychology.

App Link: PlayStore

5. Spatial Games

Here is one more app to encourage spatial reasoning and thinking skills. Downloading it gives you access to three different types of games, which can be played any time you like. The first game is the ‘Wire Modeling’ game, in which players get three different projections based on which they discover a 3D figure.

The second one, called ‘Window,’ requires players to visualize moving inside a house and imagine how the window will appear from inside the house. The last game is ‘Fly,’ where players guess the position of the fly by tracing the route the fly must have flown to reach the endpoint.

App Link: PlayStore

6. Cyberchase 3D Builder

The CyberChase app is an excellent space visualization skill development app that helps young players in understanding how 3-dimensional geometric shapes are made of 2-dimensional simple shapes. It has 8 unique levels of challenges where you construct buildings by stacking, re-stacking, and rotating shapes while changing over 70 flat 2D shapes into 40 3D structures.

And of course, the faster you construct the building the more stars you get, so the thrill in the game is ever-present. This fully interactive visual display delight, is in fact, suitable for ages to build on space visualization skills with a dash of entertainment thrown in.

App Link: App Store

Wrapping up,

Spatial reasoning games have several advantages to offer. Right from the understanding of concepts to practicing them in a practical setting, the games offer the right support at every stage. So, next time you need more ways of giving practice to the child on spatial reasoning, think of learning about these games. Having a repertoire can help a lot in giving something interesting and new that can keep the child’s interest alive. 

Manpreet Singh

An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having  just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’, 

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