Comput Appl Eng Educ. 2019;1–12. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. | 1 Received: 18 March 2019 | Accepted: 16 July 2019 DOI: 10.1002/cae.22165 RESEARCH ARTICLE GeoGebra as a spatial skills training tool among science, technology engineering and mathematics students Maja K. Tomić 1 | Boris Aberšek 2 | Igor Pesek 1 1 Department for Mathematics and Computing Science, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia 2 Institute for Contemporary Technology, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia Correspondence Maja K. Tomić, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia. Email: majakatarina.tomic@gmail.com Present address Zagreb, Croatia. Abstract Spatial abilities, which are described by Linn and Petersen as “skills in representing, transforming, generating, and recalling symbolic, nonlinguistic information” are, as such, not trained or taught in schools. Nevertheless, the importance of highly developed abilities for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students has been scientifically proven, which implies that spatial abilities can have a significant impact on success in studying STEM subjects and, later, STEM careers. The developed experimental program employing GeoGebra 5 ran for 4 weeks and was conducted at the Faculty of Science and Education in Mostar. The sample consisted of first‐year students, aged 18 to 20, with 35 male and 17 female students in the experimental and 33 male and 19 female students in the control group (CG). A spatial test was administered before the program and once again at the end, along with one more spatial test and a questionnaire, which consisted of possible highly developed spatial abilities predictors. The differences between the control and the experimental group (EG) at initial testing of spatial abilities were not statistically significant regarding any subsample. No significant correlations between the questionnaire and the initial spatial test were found. The correlation between average grade in mathematics in high school and the scores on the initial spatial test was not significant. Results showed that a statistically significant jump in performance on the posttest regarding the EG has occurred, whereas no statistically significant changes in performance have been noted regarding the CG. KEYWORDS GeoGebra, spatial abilities, spatial abilities enhancement, training model 1 | INTRODUCTION Psychologists outline several three‐dimensional (3D) spatial skills, which have been proved to be important for higher level thinking skills: spatial perception (ability to differ- entiate between horizontal and vertical), spatial visualiza- tion (mental transformations, eg, rotations, translations or mirroring, and 3D mental alterations), mental rotations (rotation of a certain object and then being able to repeat the same rotation with a different one), spatial relations (visualization of relationships between two objects such as overlapping), and spatial orientation (mentally determining your location in space) [32]. Pittalis and Christou [22] point out that factor analysis is one of the most common methods used to describe the actual structure of spatial abilities, used to break down the concept into factors that contribute to spatial comprehension [22].