Motivation
Coding skills are in high demand and will soon become a necessary skill for nearly all industries. Jobs in STEM have grown by 79 percent since 1990, and are expected to grow an additional 13 percent by 2027, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey. This provides strong motivation for educators to find a way to engage students early in building their coding knowledge.
Mixed Reality may very well be the answer. A study conducted at Georgia Tech found that students who used mobile augmented reality platforms to learn coding performed better on assessments than their counterparts. Furthermore, research at Tufts University shows that tangible programming encourages high-level computational thinking. Two of our team members are instructors for an introductory programming class at the Colorado School of Mines. One team member is an interaction designer at the California College of the Art and is new to programming. Our fourth team member is a first-year computer science at the University of Maryland. Learning from each other’s experiences, we aim to create the first mixed reality platform for tangible programming, which is also grounded in the reality-based interaction framework. This framework has two main principles:
1) First, interaction takes place in the real world, so students no longer program behind large computer monitors where they have easy access to distractions such as games, IM, and the Web.
2) Second, interaction behaves more like the real world. That is, tangible languages take advantage of students’ knowledge of the everyday, non-computer world to express and enforce language syntax.
Using these two concepts, we bring you MusicBlox!
What is is
MusicBlox combines mixed reality with introductory programming lessons to create a tangible programming experience. In comparison to other products on the market, like the LEGO Mindstorm, our tangible programming education platform cuts cost in the classroom (no need to buy expensive hardware!), increases reliability (virtual objects will never get tear and wear), and allows greater freedom in the design of the tangible programming blocks (teachers can print out new card/tiles and map them to new programming concepts).
This platform is currently usable on the Magic Leap AR headset, but will soon be expanded to more readily available platforms like phones and tablets.
Our platform is built using the research performed by Google’s Project Bloks and operates under a similar principle of gamifying programming and using tangible programming lessons.
The platform consists of a baseboard where students must place tiles. Each of these tiles is associated with a concrete world item. For our first version, we focused on music. Thus, the tiles include a song note, a guitar, a piano, and a record. These tiles can be combined in various ways to teach programming concepts. Students must order the tiles correctly on the baseboard in order to win the various levels on the platform. For example, on level 1, a student must correctly place a music note, a piano, and a sound in order to reinforce the concept of a method. That is, an input (song note) is fed into a method (the piano) to produce an output (sound).
Thus, this platform not only provides a tangible way of thinking (students are able to interact with the tiles while visualizing augmented objects), but also makes use of everyday, non-computer world objects to express and enforce computational thinking.
How we built it
Our initial version is deployed on the Magic Leap AR headset. There are four components to the project, which we split equally among our team members.
The first is image recognition, which Natalie worked predominantly on. This required using the Magic Leap API to locate and track various image targets (the baseboard, the tiles) and rendering augmented objects on those tracked targets.
The second component, which Nhan worked on, involved extended reality interaction. This involved both Magic Leap and Unity to determine how to interact with buttons and user interfaces in the Magic leap headset.
The third component, which Casey spearheaded, focused on integration and scene development within Unity. As the user flows through the program, there are different game scenes they encounter, which Casey designed and implemented. Furthermore, Casey ensured the seamless integration of all these scenes for a flawless user experience.
The fourth component, led by Ryan, involved project design, research, and user experience. Ryan tackled user interaction layouts to determine the best workflow for children to learn programming, concept development, and packaging of the platform.
Challenges we ran into
We faced many challenges with the nuances of the Magic Leap platform, but we are extremely grateful to the Magic Leap mentors for providing their time and expertise over the duration of the hackathon!
Accomplishments that We’re Proud of
We are very proud of the user experience within our product. This feels like a platform that we could already begin testing with children and getting user feedback. With our design expert Ryan, we were able to package the platform to be clean, fresh, and easy to interact with.
What We learned
Two of our team members were very unfamiliar with the Magic Leap platform, so we were able to learn a lot about mixed reality platforms that we previously did not. By implementing MusicBlox, we learned about image recognition and object manipulation within Magic Leap. Moreover, with our scene integration, we all learned more about the Unity platform and game development.
What’s next for MusicBlox: Tangible Programming Education in Mixed Reality
This platform is currently only usable on the Magic Leap AR device. Our next big step would be to expand to more readily available platforms like phones and tablets. This would allow for more product integration within classrooms.
Furthermore, we only have one version which depends on music concepts and teaches methods and loops. We would like to expand our versions to include other everyday objects as a basis for learning abstract programming concepts.
Recent Comments