Projects

ardesia

Ardesia enables you to make colored free-hand annotations on your screen and record it. This is especially useful when making presentations, to highlight things or point out things of interest. Ardesia is XInput-Aware, so if you have a mouse, a graphic tablet, a touch screen or a whiteboard, you ... [More] can draw lines with different strength, select color, erase things and draw arrows. You can free-hand draw geometrical shapes using the shape recognizer, insert text with the keyboard and highlight screen areas. You can draw upon the desktop or select an image as background. [Less]

wiiclassroomfeedback

Below is our initial summary, it is restated in more detail in the wiki. Classroom feedback systems are gaining popularity in college and high-school classrooms. These systems are generally limited to 'clicker' technology which supports multiple-choice answering (think "ask the ... [More] audience"). We hope to utilize existing PC-Wiimote communication projects to allow students to respond to a wider variety of question types. Multiple choice answering (using the buttons, swinging the remote towards an answer quadrant) Graphic answering (use a swing to generate a vector on a graph to respond to vector addition, draw a plot, etc) Advanced graphic answering (basically using the wiimote as a mouse to generate answer) Numeric Answering (using buttons, or shaking the wiimote vertically to increase the number, side-to-side to decrease). Pointing (quadrant-based multiple choice, number lines, choosing a point on a graph) Stretch Answering (using the wiimote to stretch out a line which is anchored at the origin to create a vector) Display types: Multiple choice answers can display as pie-graphs, multi-axis number lines (a la big brain academy, not sure what these are really called). Swing answers can all be shown, best answer shown, correct answer shown, mean answer shown, standard deviation shading. These answers can emanate from the origin or be centered on the answer. Can be displayed in real time (crowd effect), or after an answer window. Pointing can be in real time or after an answer window. Feedback: Rumble/Sound feedback could be given for: a) first correct answer b) all correct answers c) wrong answers This could be combined such that a student can answer multiple times until the right answer is obtained. Statistics: min, max, mean, stdev of time to answer min, max, mean, stdev of numerical answers min, max, mean, stdev of number of tries required for right answer. [Less]

wiikinemathics

This software is used in the "Kinemathics" research project at the Embodied Design Research Laboratory, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley. It enables students to act out "proportional progressions" in which they raise their hands from a flat surface such that they ... [More] maintain a fixed ratio (say 2:3) between the height of their hands. A Nintendo Wii remote can track infrared LED dots placed on the students' hands, and the software provides feedback on the accuracy of the hand motion. Theoretical PremiseCurrent instructional practices in mathematics education can by-and-large be said to focus on students' development of competencies involving the production of textual, symbolical, and diagrammatic semiotic artifacts through activities such as computation, problem-solving, and logical argument. Research into the embodied nature of mathematical cognition, however, points to the central role of body-based experience in grounding mathematical concepts and enabling problem-solving. We are interested in how students recruit their body-based pre-articulated experiences as a basis for the reflective abstraction of embodied schemata that come to underlie their production of normative mathematical semiotic artifacts. A pilot study conducted by Abrahamson and Fuson (2005) demonstrated that students' cognitive difficulties in understanding proportional progression (e.g., the sequence of equivalent proportions 2:3, 4:6, 6:9, etc.) coincided with their physical difficulty of acting out such progressions with their hands (e.g., one hand grows by 2 units while the other hand simultaneously grows by 3). Our bold conjecture is that a lack of physical coordination might delimit the mental simulation of a concept, and therefore impede its mental construction. If we physically support the students in enacting the ambidexterity of proportional progression, they may be able to draw on their physical experience in developing a dynamic image of proportion, a potential prerequisite for conceptual understanding. Building on this conjecture, we plan to examine whether kinesthetically-induced experiences of proportional progression help students learn the mathematical concept. Further ReadingAbrahamson, D., & Howison, M. L. (2008, December). Kinemathics: Kinetically induced mathematical learning. Presentation and workshop at the UC Berkeley Gesture Group (E. Sweetser, Director), December 5, 2008. PDF [Less]

wiimotegui

We are developing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for using the Nintendo Wii remote in physics experiments. By designing a graphical user interface we can take advantage of the accelerometers built into the Wiimote and use it in general physics experiments. This GUI is going to be designed for use by professors and students.