Visualization Skills in Engineering Education: Issues, Developments, and Enhancement

Visualization In Engineering Drawing

Engineering drawing is a way to communicate graphically. It covers technical regulations or requirements of drawing and visual skills (Olkun, 2003). Visualization is a skills or capabilities naturally born, however Wiley (1989) and Sorby and Baartmans (2003) observe that the visualization skills can be enhanced by explaining students with lower visualization ability and then trained using specific training modules to enhance their visualization capabilities in engineering drawing. According to Sorby (2007), the uses of multimedia with workbooks have shown positive impact in developing and enhancing three-dimensional spatial skills of the student.

There is clear evidence that visualizing three-dimensional objects and manipulating them in mind is important to engineers and helps many graphics engineering professionals solve engineering drawing problems (Deno, 1995; Miller & Bertoline, 1991a, 1991b; Parolini, 1994). In engineering, Miller (1990) and Sorby and Gorska (1998) specialize in the field of visualization research also appears as a subfield of research exploring spatial ability and spatial rotation as a process of mental imagery manipulation. For example, Pellegrino, Alderton and Shute (1984) subdivide spatial ability into two components as spatial relations and spatial visualization with a psychometric measurement of speed, power and complexity of an individual’s spatial manipulations.