Teaching movement science with full-body motion capture in an undergraduate liberal arts psychology class

Shengwei Yaoa,David Nevillec,Damian Kelty-Stephend,Elizabeth Queathemb

doi:10.25304/rlt.v26.2119

Abstract

Movement science is a field that is quickly growing in its scope, leaning heavily on psychological expertise for research design with human participants but requiring computational and engineering ability. Undergraduate psychology curricula are in a unique position to train some of its future scholars. This report reviews an attempt to pilot a class on motion capture for undergraduate psychology students. Recent developments in motion-capture technology have opened up the opportunity for giving hands-on experience with high-quality motion capture for students at liberal-arts colleges with leaner research budgets. Post-course responses to the Research on Integrated Science Curriculum (RISC) survey demonstrated that our students made significantly large gains in their ability to organise an empirical approach to study a complex problem with no clear solution, and to collect and analyse data to produce a coherent insight about that problem. Students may benefit from incorporating motion capture into their undergraduate psychology curriculum. Published: 4 October 2018 Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2018, 26 : 2119 - http://dx.doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2119 View Supplementary material

Highlights

The goal of this article is to provide evidence that newly accessible technology for human motion capture offers a rich opportunity for inquiry-driven science training, allowing domain-specific training in movement science and supporting a variety of domain-general skills for an integrated science curriculum for liberal arts students
Through internal funding focused on developing innovative pedagogies, we were able to purchase six of Noitom’s Perception Neuron full-body suit, and in Spring 2017, we offered a 300-level course in the Psychology Department called ‘Motion Capture of Human Movement’ to pilot the proposal that liberal arts psychology students would benefit from the integrated science framework prompted – or sooner demanded – by w orking with motion-capture technology
We aimed to identify whether there were post-course gains that might exceed the average of all students responding to the Research on Integrated Science Curriculum (RISC) of that semester

Summary

Introduction

The goal of this article is to provide evidence that newly accessible technology for human motion capture offers a rich opportunity for inquiry-driven science training, allowing domain-specific training in movement science and supporting a variety of domain-general skills for an integrated science curriculum for liberal arts students. The class included time searching peer-reviewed literature on movement research because the constraints offerings at a small liberal arts college left most students unaware that movement itself was a topic of peer-reviewed basic research.

Results

Conclusion