Blending 'movements with computer' to enhance computational skills in girls

Researchers are developing new software called Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvl), sync's the body movements' of girls with the computer, making their computational thinking skills better.

Lead author Shaundra Daily has performed alongside her virtual character and designed innovative new technologies that would bring together sensors and machine learning with theories of human learning.

The special software for ladies designed by Daily allows girls to sync their body movements' with the computer. Fifth- and sixth-grade girls were tested with the novel technology that required them to create a virtual character in a three-dimensional environment.

The girls were required to think up new computer strategies to improve their dance choreography, evaluate new animation algorithms, and align them with their own body movements.

Researchers agreed that they wanted to understand how body syntonicity might enable young learners to bootstrap their intuitive knowledge in order to program a three-dimensional character to perform movements.

The students moved and created pieces for their virtual characters to perform, bringing about connections between computational thinking and what their bodies are doing.

The findings have indicated the active presentation of concepts and future scalability of their virtual environment VEnvI would add to the rich landscape of emerging technologies that geared toward more inclusive strategies to engage girls in computational thinking.

This emerging technology has the potential to widen the scope of current technologies that seek to cultivate computational thinking for diverse designers, users and audiences, according to the researchers.

The study is published in journal Technology, Knowledge and Learning.