Examining the development process of seventh grade students' spatial orientation strategies in the orienteering game environment

Orienteering activities are a good way to use such as map-and-compass skills, decision making and strategy development as well as to apply children's spatial orientation. The purpose of this study is to investigate seventh graders' spatial orientation strategies in a learning environment which is designed based on real-world orienteering activities. 10 middle-school students enrolled in a 6-month design-based research which is focused on using real-world orienteering activities. The results of the study indicate that the learning environment which is designed based on real-world orienteering activities supports middle-school students' spatial orientation from the aspects of mapping skills, exploring spatial patterns and developing different navigation strategies in order to find a target location. Moreover, some aspects of this competency such as drawing map, inferring map and using cardinal directions are supported in this environment. The most notable result is that orientation strategies used by students show the change from undesirable to desirable types based on real-world orienteering activities. At the beginning, many students were only able to use egocentric landmark strategies. At the end, the participants preferred to use allocentric Euclidean strategies instead of egocentric landmark strategies, and most of them were masterfully able to use both strategies. As a consequence, it is seen that there is a remarkable movement from both egocentric to allocentric strategies and landmark to Euclidean strategies.