Abstract:

Serious games in education have been proven to help students in learning and rehearsing new concepts in an entertaining environment which improve their learning capacities and increase their motivation. Thus in this work, we propose a ludic application based on Microsoft Kinect that allows assessing the knowledge of students in Chemistry, namely the periodic table. A set of exercises related to this subject has been set by a group of primary and secondary school professors. The exercises are sorted into blocks where each block contains a series of questions of varied difficulty. For instance, the student must associate the name of an element from the periodic table to its symbol or vice versa, assign a specific atom to its number of oxidation or valence number, or relate each chemical element to its practical application in real world, among others. These exercises are then transformed to an interactive game where students can see themselves on a screen together with the question and the offered options. Each option is displayed as a game object in the scene such as a cube or a representative image. The game is controlled by body gestures so in order to select an answer; the student must move his body to touch the object either by his head, hands, or hips. Visual and auditory feedback is also given to enhance the user experience.

We have a demo videogame to show at the conferece.

Keywords:

Serious games, vision based systems, quimics, kinetcs, periodic table.