We developed a Photo Stereo Graphic Mental Cutting Test (hereafter, PS-MCT), in which problems were given by stereo pairs of photographs of real objects. We administered the PS-MCT, together with the standard MCT, to university students. Principal results of the experiments are as follows. 1) The correct answer rates of the PS-MCT were higher than those of the standard MCT only in some of the 25 problems of the MCTs. They were not different in many other problems between the two MCTs. 2) Detailed analysis of the alternatives selected by the students showed that the higher correct answer rates of the PS-MCT were due to easier recognition of the objects and the relative position of the cutting planes, indicating that many errors in the standard MCT occurred in the process to recognize the objects and relative position of the cutting planes. It also suggested that, in the problems whose correct answer rates were not differ-ent between the two MCTs, many errors occurred in the processes to generate cuts of the objects by the cutting planes, to process hidden parts of the problems, and to judge the quantities such as the lengths of the edges of the cuts.

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Although, substantial time should be allocated for practical training and exercise in basic design instruction, it is difficult to do so at two-year art schools, junior colleges, and art teacher training courses at four-year universities. In these schools, students are often given opportunities to learn the gist of design process through challenging projects which require artistic imaginations and organizational skills.
In these cases, students are generally beginners in artistic design and it is appropriate to use simple motifs such as “geometrical patterns” to develop their sense for composition..
In this paper, we present two cases of basic design instruction in which we used the “Tangram” and “development patterns of a cube” to teach basic design to begining students.

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