You can improve your spatial-visual skills! How to improve your visual-spatial skills?

You may not have known that many jobs require you to be able to use visual-spatial abilities. Visual-spatial abilities are used by mathematicians and neurosurgeons as well as architects, engineers, designers and programmers. You need these skills to visualize, analyze, manipulate or rotate 3D and 2D figures. In your everyday life, you use these skills to pack your luggage, park your car or tie your shoes. No matter what your age is, here’s how you can improve these skills by playing games. Play some games!

Peek a Zoo helps pre-schoolers develop their visual-spatial abilities. Use spatial language and gestures to play the game with your toddler. Children who are taught to use language and gestures that include words such as short, big, pointed, left, top, diagonal etc., perform better in spatial tests. Encourage your child to repeat and use the words for a quicker learning curve. This construction matching game encourages children to match images on challenge cards in terms of colour, shape and visible figures.

Tangram Junior is available for 4-year-olds. Tangrams are a long-standing game that originated in ancient China. The 7 pieces of the puzzle must be used to create an object, person or animal. These puzzles are often used to teach spatial abilities in math classes. Some exercises may seem simple at first, but can be quite challenging. Rotate the puzzle pieces so your child can see what they look like upside down, or with their left or right side facing out.

Criss-Cross Cube is an exciting 3D puzzle for children and adults. You need to screw different size bolts into a transparent cube, without causing them to block each other. Rotate the cube to see it from different angles. Imagine your move before you place a screw. The Criss-Cross Cube can be used to anticipate what the cubes will look like from different angles when they are not in the room.

These skills are sharpened by creating maps and pathways. Classic SmartGame and Horse Academy require you to take the horse through the game by jumping over the obstacles in the right order. Based on clues from the challenge, you need to place the puzzle pieces and obstacles in the correct order on the board and create a path.

Want to test your friend’s spatial-visual skills? Play Cube Duel. You can win by placing as many blocks of the same colour on the free surfaces of the cube. Whoever has the best visual-spatial skills wins! This game will encourage you to use your skills under pressure. Still not winning? Mental rotation can be improved by practicing in the single-player mode!

What is your favorite activity to improve visual-spatial skills? Tell us via @smartgamessocial!