Superhero Island
While studying Industrial Design (ID) at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) I joined Waag Society for my internship project.
Waag Society is an institute for art, science and technology, which develops creative technology for social innovation. “The foundation researches, develops concepts, pilots and prototypes and acts as an intermediate between the arts, science and the media.”
For half a year I investigated how embodied learning, a way of learning that involves movement of the whole body, could be applied to Dutch school classrooms in a useful manner. The goal was to teach maths and (Dutch) language with this new system.
The internship involved concept design by creating new interactive ideas that appealed to primary school children, and that were executable in a classroom using the Microsoft Kinect gaming sensor. I created a complete concept of a Superhero Island where heroes are prepared for the real world. This story allowed for various different interactive levels which addressed many kinds of school topics.
On top of that I created a working demo with which I tested the concept in real classroom situations. To achieve this I wrote a piece of software using the Java-based language Processing and suitable OpenNI Kinect drivers to create the interactive demo, and a web interface which interacted with this demo and allowed teachers to change game content.