Interactive Skipping / Jumping Created by: Eric Harris Ted Phelps

This gives children and children at heart an opportunity to program and interact with computers without having to touch a keyboard. Here we made use of the ECT (Equip Component Toolkit) that we and our partners have been developing as part of the Equator project. This toolkit integrates off the shelf hardware like web cams or plug and play sensors, and connects them together to provide a wide assortment of controlled inputs and outputs. Inputs range from pressure and light sensors through to radio frequency tags similar to those found on clothes in shops. Outputs are motors, lights, projected images and sound.

Usage Scenario:

Children are able to configure the experience by choosing the difficulty of a skipping task and determining the displayed output of their skipping. A child can define their own set of parameters with which to measure their performance, for example speed of the skipping rope, the number of skips, or the force of their jumps. Each input parameter will be represented as a tangible component that can be set in three different ways to produce different measures, for example an increment to measure every 1, 2 or 3 skips.

Applications supported by the device:

Embodied interactions
ECT (Equip Component Toolkit)


System Architecture:

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