Project SPAC3 (pronounced “space”, A Culturally Relevant Approach to Spatial Computational Thinking Skills and Career Awareness through an Immersive Virtual Environment), to develop an innovative informal learning program and suitable technologies for two main project objectives: 1) foster upper elementary school Latinx students’ spatial computational thinking skills; 2) raise upper elementary school Latinx students’ awareness of computationally-intensive careers, interest and self-efficacies in computing and engineering

• Platform (under development)MacOS/Windows/Linux
• StackJava

• Based on the concreteness fading theory, we will design the learning activities to start with a concrete representation of a key spatial concept that affords physical interactions; then transfer to a generic pictorial representation; and end with the decontextualized abstract representations.
  


• To help students practice procedural and generative paradigms of spatial computational thinking in MEE, we will design a new SPAC3 module.
  


• An example of using the SPAC3 module functions to create Chichen Itza’s El Castillo, a Mayan pyramid that represents a classic cultural artifact in Mesoamerica, and use the CheckShape block to automatically validate the spatial programming results.