Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

2. ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, 2.2 ELECTRICAL, ELECTRONIC, INFORMATION ENGINEERING

Publication Details

In Eighth International Conference on Technological
Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM’20), October 21–23, 2020,
Salamanca, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the structure of a girls summer school, “SAperI – Spatial Ability per l’Ingegneria” (in English, “Knowledge – Spatial Ability for Engineering”), and to illustrate its impact on spatial ability development and future career preferences on those who participated in the week long summer school compared to a control group that did not participate.The 5 days school,
organized by Politecnico di Torino (Italy), was included in a larger project addressing 17 years old high-school students. Thirtyseven girls actively took part in a summer school, while 167 students (both males and females) were tested as a controlled group.For those who attended the summer school, significant gains were observed in four measures of spatial ability - mental rotation, spatial
visualization, mental cutting and paper folding. For a minority of participants, scores on one of these tests, paper folding, were lower when measured at the end of the summer school but this was an exception. Furthermore, when tested several months after the summer school, the gains in spatial ability that were made during the course were maintained indicating stability over time with regard to the improvement in spatial ability.In terms of the experience of taking the course, the feedback provided was very positive and all but one participant would recommend the summer school to other
girls at this stage of high school.

DOI

https://doi.org/10. 1145/3434780.3436577

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