SpatialEase: Learning Language through Body Motion
- Darren Edge ,
- Kai-Yin Cheng ,
- Michael Whitney
CHI 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Information Systems |
Published by ACM
Games that engage both mind and body by targeting users’ kinesthetic intelligence have the potential to transform the activity of learning across a wide variety of domains. To investigate this potential in the context of second language learning, we have developed SpatialEase: a Kinect game for the body-based learning of language that is grounded in space and motion. In this game, learners respond to audio commands in the second language by moving their bodies in space, while a game mechanic based on distributed cued-recall supports learning over time. Our comparison of SpatialEase with the popular Rosetta Stone software for learner of Mandarin Chinese showed similar learning gains over a single session and generated several key implications for the future design of mixed-modality learning systems.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.CHI 2013, April 27-May 2, 2013, Paris, France.Copyright © 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-1899-0/13/04...$15.00.