Improvement of Problem Solving Skills in Engineering Drawing Using Blender Based Mental Rotation Training

First year undergraduate students in engineering often face difficulties in solving engineering drawing (ED) problems. The potential reasons for this could be either the students´ deficiency in visualizing spatial relationships or the instructional method used. We have developed a three-hour MR training using Blender 3D, an open source 3D animation software. In this paper, we present experimental evidence of the effect of our training on the improvement of problem solving skills in ED. We analyzed the results and found them to be significant. Also, the qualitative analysis of students´ responses to the open ended questions revealed that, they found training useful in resolving their difficulties in solving ED problems.