GrowthMoves

Project description

Design a set of exergames using Android hardware to enable children in grade 4/group 6-7 to engage in both balancing tasks as well as cognitive automation exercises with appropriate design.

Context

Research shows that primary school children aged between 9 and 11 nowadays lag behind in their development of balance, object control and cognitive automation skills. Other research also shows that children retain knowledge faster when they learn while exercising. Our assignment is to develop exergames that combine these skills.

Results

We created two prototypes, Annemaria Koekoek and 3 Is Teveel. We validated these prototypes by interviewing experts, pabo students and primary school teachers about our project. We also tested the prototypes ourselves, resulting in TRLevel 4. Due to COVID we were unable to test our prototypes with the intended user base. With these prototypes we could determine how well balance and cognitive automation improve, also functioning as a final validation of the concepts.

Methodology

The concepts were validated by performing tons of interviews with our different stakeholders, and expert interviews, as well as paper prototyping. These gave us constant results, allowing us to change the concepts constantly for the better, ending with two concepts that are a perfect match for our design challenge. This was a big challenge throughout the project, since there were many different stakeholders involved (GrowthMoves, Picoo, teachers, students) each with their own vision of the final product. Each interview was prepared well beforehand with a set goal in mind, for the interview with Picoo we wanted to learn about the hardware limitations and the possible SDK's accessibility and limitations, while for the interview with teachers and pabo students we wanted to know all about the scenario's these exergames would be played in.

Using Unity's accelerometer and gyroscope libraries, we analyzed the accuracy and viability of this hardware in Android phones and used this data to change parameters in our prototypes.
Accelerometer - Data analytics, Prototyping.
Gyroscope - Data analytics, Prototyping.

We compared different techniques like GPS Locatio and Bluetooth for nearby device detection by looking at research documents online.
We used Unity's GPS functionality to access GPS Location and also developed a Bluetooth plugin to access the bluetooth functionality in Android phones and analyzed the accuracy and viability of this hardware for nearby device detection.
Mimicking nearby device detection on android - Literature Study, Available Product Analysis, Prototyping. QR-scanning - Available Product
Analysis, Prototyping.