Ellington

Students and faculty at UW Bothell are developing a program that teaches math with the help of an Xbox controller.

The program, called Kinect Math, is a project headed by professors Robin Angotti and Kelvin Sung of Washington’s Bothell campus. Programmed by undergraduates Jack Chang and Jeb Palveas, the project utilizes the Kinect, a camera designed for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console, to track body movement. The students use their bodies to manipulate on-screen graphs. The program is intended to help students learn an abstract and visual method of math.

The idea for Kinect Math came from Angotti, a professor of education and a self-proclaimed “early adopter of technology.” Angotti said she believes that using body movement to teach math can give students a better understanding of abstract concepts.

“[Among some students], there’s this disconnect between this algorithmic equation and what they’re supposed to do with it,” she explained. “My hope as a teacher is that this is a way to bridge that gap and help it make sense for them.”

With a background in teaching high-school math, she began thinking of ways to teach mathematics through movement. Angotti and Sung began working with a motion probe that connected to a graphing calculator, but found the technology too expensive and outdated.

“At Christmas last year, I looked over at the TV and saw a commercial for the Kinect,” Angotti recalled. “I said, ‘Well, that’s just a big motion detector. Why can’t we get that to do what we want it to do?’ And Kelvin said, ‘We can.’”

Soon after, Chang and Palveas, both in Bothell’s Computing and Software Systems program, began working under Angotti and Sung to develop Kinect Math. After some testing and fine-tuning, the program saw its first public release Dec. 16.

Kinect Math has already been met with acclaim among the software-development community. The development team won the “What Will You Create?” contest held by KinectEDucation, an online community of educators experimenting with Kinect in the classroom, and earned $500 for Sung’s class. Chang and Palveas have also been selected as finalists in the software design division of the U.S. Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s annual competition encouraging participants “to use technology to solve the world’s toughest problems.”

Feedback from K-12 students has also been positive, Angotti said. In the past few weeks, Angotti has used Kinect Math with a group of fifth grade students. She found that they were able to understand concepts such as rate of change without any prior knowledge.

“[The students realized that] if a line was steep, then the rate of change was high and that means they would have to move faster,” she said. “All of a sudden, they were talking about rate of change — and these are fifth graders; they don’t know rate of change yet.”

While Kinect Math has allowed students to understand math in intuitive ways, some in the education community see such projects as a sign of a change in education.

“What we don’t learn in the standard curriculum is to experience mathematics as a creative endeavor,” said Max Lieblich, associate professor of math at the UW. “Any way we have of getting people interested in interacting with mathematics is a way to help them increase their enjoyment of the activity and ultimately, their understanding.”

Angotti hopes for her ideas to spread to other areas of education.

“What I see is my idea opening up the door for anyone that needs a visualization [for learning],” she said. “Somebody’s going to take this idea and make it much bigger.”

Reach reporter Nathan Ureta at news@dailyuw.com.