Thanks Steve. That was definitely an important finding in the pilot. We’ve been paying attention to the types of avatars that students create, and we’ve been somewhat surprised. We thought, perhaps, that students would create characters like them, but there have been very mixed results. And when we added options for aliens, robots, and other non-human characters, the selections were even more varied. Although we’ve been focused on understanding the affordances of embodiment for learning computational thinking, moving forward, we plan on paying more focused attention on these things as it relates to student engagement.

The character development capability is pretty cool. How much time do the students spend creating characters? I could imagine that would be very engrossing for some students and it might be hard to have them move on to the next step.

Hi Jeff. Definitely something we saw. They were disappointed initially (in the pilot) not to be able to change the character, then when we added that functionality with the new system, they wanted to spend a lot of time on it. We currently have time limits on the character development, but moving forward we’re looking into students being able to “unlock” more and more aspects of the character creation as thy become more proficient with programming.

We’ve had some surprises around participation. Students have been recruited from a variety of places, an arts school, a gifted school, a school with mandated diversity (gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status), and a women in science and engineering camp. We’ve also done a number of art exhibits. In each case, it totally depends on the culture we’re able to establish. In the above camp, we had a student who didn’t realize movement was apart of it and basically said he was “out”. By the end of the camp his dance was so intricate that no one wanted to go after him. So if “everybody is doing it” and no one is worried about your skill level, then students are much more willing even if they have no dance background. :)

We actually had to create a new platform rather than using Looking glass after that initial pilot. Those motions were fed into the new software, which we are calling VEnVI.

We created the new software, VEnvI, using the development platform Unity, which supports motion captured animations.

Can you describe (or point to resources) this process a little more? We conduct motion studies of circus arts activities using Tracker Video Analysis which is limited to planar analysis. How much more complicated is it to capture 3-D motion?
http://woodsideonewheelers.org

With pleasure. We are using an optical motion capture system from Vicon with 14 cameras and the software Blade. The dancer wears a suit with retroreflective markers, which positions are tracked in 3D. Based on those marker positions, a skeleton is reconstructed, which is used to animate a virtual character.
There are a lot of commercial motion capture systems consisting of different hardware and software, using different sensors, some rather simple, some very complex. Which one works for you depends on factors such as the space you need to cover, the type of motions, the required accuracy, and how much you can spend in money and time.
Looking at your project, inertial systems, markerless 3D systems, or optical marker based systems might be worth looking at. Inertial systems are relatively cheap and offer an unlimited capture area, but the suit might disturb, accuracy errors add up, and only one person at a time can use it. Markerless 3D systems are using video analysis to track motions. Some just use standard cameras, some use depth sensors. The algorithms are getting better every year, but I have not tried one recently for full body motions. Marker based optical motion capture systems typically have the highest accuracy and frame rates, but are expensive, especially if the capture space is large and a lot of cameras are needed. I hope this very short introduction helps.

Carol, great question. We’ve done an after school version and a camp that were both self-selected. While we suspected that we would have more women and minorities, that’s not what we saw. Our representation though was at of South Carolina where we’re doing the work, so these populations were not underrepresented. Where gender did play out was in the types of performances created. We generally saw girls creating narratives that included dance.

It’s so interesting about creating narratives around the experience. I think that’s such a powerful tool we can all leverage to get kids more engaged in exhibits and STEM

Thanks Jenna. The VEnvI software is going to be available on our website at no cost (www.venvi.org). We hope to be able to create a platform for teachers and students and are seeking Cyberlearning funding for it to allow for dissemination.
We’ve worked with 4th – 8th grade students, and it honestly just depends. We initially thought 4th and 5th would be most willing given the dance portion. But we’ve been able to foster an environment with 7th and 8th grade students who became comfortable. The “everybody is doing it” mentality worked in that case.

Making VEnvI available for use at home is definitely one of our future goals. But we have a lot of work and research ahead of us to make this possible and a valuable and engaging experience. Ideally, parents would not need any specific computer science knowledge, apart from how to install a program or app. We need to create appropriate materials that parents can then explore with their children.