Dance like a function!
- Created on 30 September 2015
Dance like a function! Gaming tools meet Cinderella.
http://www.meumesmo.com.br/blog/2015/10/15/being-an-educational-game-designer
Teaching mathematics is not that trivial. Learning it is not so easy too. The advances in technology are changing student's culture and behaviour, with impact on their way in studying, as well as on their everyday work performed in the classroom. Smart phones, tablets, clocks and other devices are increasingly part of the lives of young people and teenagers.
Therefore it is a challenge to motivate students towards education, and mainly towards mathematics education. We will not investigate here reasons and responsibilities; however, we know that a motivated student can achieve his objectives with much less pain using technology.
Starting from these assumptions, Pedro Lealdino Filho, PhD student in the framework of MC Squared project, started to develop educational games, aiming at fostering the motivation in students to learn mathematics in a different way. Pedro developed a game using the Kinect sensor to enable students dancing like functions. The Kinect sensor is a motion sensor add-on for gaming consoles, that allows users to interact intuitively and without any intermediary device.
With crucial support from Prof. Christian Mercat, as supervisor of Pedro’s thesis, Pedro developed algorithms to read the data coming from the Kinect sensor, interpreting the data generated by the movements from the user's body into function graphs.
Thanks to the software in the M C Squared project, the development of educational games to teach mathematics became much easier. Cinderella, combined with some external tools, provided all required features to develop the game "Dance like a function", which is show in the following picture.
