Hand-clapping Games Research Articles

How Does It Feel to Clap Hands with a Robot?

Future robots may need lighthearted physical interaction capabilities to connect with people in meaningful ways. To begin exploring how users perceive playful human-robot hand-to-hand interaction, we conducted a study with 20 participants. Each user played simple hand-clapping games with the Rethink Robotics Baxter Research Robot during a 1-h-long session involving 24 randomly ordered conditions that varied in facial reactivity, physical reactivity, arm stiffness, and clapping tempo. Survey data and experiment recordings demonstrate that this interaction is viable: all users successfully completed the experiment and mentioned enjoying at least one game without prompting. Hand-clapping tempo was highly salient to users, and human-like robot errors were more widely accepted than mechanical errors. Furthermore, perceptions of Baxter varied in the following statistically significant ways: facial reactivity increased the robot’s perceived pleasantness and energeticness; physical reactivity decreased pleasantness, energeticness, and dominance; higher arm stiffness increased safety and decreased dominance; and faster tempo increased energeticness and increased dominance. These findings can motivate and guide roboticists who want to design social-physical human-robot interactions.

Teaching a Robot Bimanual Hand-Clapping Games via Wrist-Worn IMUs.

Colleagues often shake hands in greeting, friends connect through high fives, and children around the world rejoice in hand-clapping games. As robots become more common in everyday human life, they will have the opportunity to join in these social-physical interactions, but few current robots are intended to touch people in friendly ways. This article describes how we enabled a Baxter Research Robot to both teach and learn bimanual hand-clapping games with a human partner. Our system monitors the user's motions via a pair of inertial measurement units (IMUs) worn on the wrists. We recorded a labeled library of 10 common hand-clapping movements from 10 participants; this dataset was used to train an SVM classifier to automatically identify hand-clapping motions from previously unseen participants with a test-set classification accuracy of 97.0%. Baxter uses these sensors and this classifier to quickly identify the motions of its human gameplay partner, so that it can join in hand-clapping games. This system was evaluated by N = 24 naïve users in an experiment that involved learning sequences of eight motions from Baxter, teaching Baxter eight-motion game patterns, and completing a free interaction period. The motion classification accuracy in this less structured setting was 85.9%, primarily due to unexpected variations in motion timing. The quantitative task performance results and qualitative participant survey responses showed that learning games from Baxter was significantly easier than teaching games to Baxter, and that the teaching role caused users to consider more teamwork aspects of the gameplay. Over the course of the experiment, people felt more understood by Baxter and became more willing to follow the example of the robot. Users felt uniformly safe interacting with Baxter, and they expressed positive opinions of Baxter and reported fun interacting with the robot. Taken together, the results indicate that this robot achieved credible social-physical interaction with humans and that its ability to both lead and follow systematically changed the human partner's experience.

Understanding social motor coordination

Recently there has been much interest in social coordination of motor movements, or as it is referred to by some researchers, joint action. This paper reviews the cognitive perspective’s common coding/mirror neuron theory of joint action, describes some of its limitations and then presents the behavioral dynamics perspective as an alternative way of understanding social motor coordination. In particular, behavioral dynamics’ ability to explain the temporal coordination of interacting individuals is detailed. Two experiments are then described that demonstrate how dynamical processes of synchronization are apparent in the coordination underlying everyday joint actions such as martial art exercises, hand-clapping games, and conversations. The import of this evidence is that emergent dynamic patterns such as synchronization are the behavioral order that any neural substrate supporting joint action (e.g., mirror systems) would have to sustain.

Born to Hand Jive

This article discusses the use of hand-clapping games and dances in the music classroom. In addition to their use for teaching music skills and concepts, these games can be quite useful for making cross-disciplinary connections to reinforce the eighth and ninth National Standards for Music Education (Standard 8: understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts; Standard 9: understanding music in relation to history and culture). Specifically, the article focuses on the Hand Jive and the ways that it may be used to help students see connections to music in history and culture as well as the underlying mathematical concept of repeated patterns on which the movements are based.

Korean Folk Music in Your Curriculum

www.mej.sagepub.com Not so many years ago, most of the music taught in classrooms in the United States originated in America or Europe. In recent years, there has been an explosion of multicultural materials for use by the general music educator: African, Latino, and South Asian musical resources immediately come to mind as readily available. American students can drum authentic African rhythms, play Javanese gamelan or Caribbean pan, partner in Japanese hand-clapping games, and sing songs from places as diverse as Polynesia and Poland. Music catalogs offer a veritable smorgasbord from which to select music from various cultures to whet our students' musical appetites. However, in my search for Korean music, I found few examples available for classroom use. In fact, in the master index of songs of a major music textbook publisher, there were only nine examples of Korean music out of a total of ninety-seven entries under the category Asia: East and Southeast.