How 3D printing of the Ames Room can promote the visual-spatial perspective change in students and teachers

Abstract

The link between egocentric, heterocentric and allocentric points of view is strictly connected
with inclusive teaching; in fact the teachers who observe the students in the classroom, in an
egocentric way take into account the point of view of each one in order to promote the didactic
action. In this way the teacher can make better use of the space available to him, and students
can learn by promoting their own personal learning style that takes into account the body in the
classroom. In this regard, the distorted room of Ames, a well-known experiment of New Look
psychology, which promote reflection on the change of perspective, was taken into consideration.
In this work, the Ames room was prototyped for 3D printing, and the file was made available
online in an open source perspective to offer primary schools an exercise involving teachers and
students. The purpose of the exercise is to reduce some perceptual preconceptions typical of
human nature in teachers and pupils and demonstrate that everyone's point of view is different
depending on whether the same phenomenon is looked at from one perspective or another. The
prototype will be delivered to the Morlacchi Institute of Perugia so that a first experimentation
can be completed at this primary school and the data collected will be analyzed in order to be
extended to a larger-scale experimentation.