Enhancing Orbital Physics Learning Performance through a Hands-on Kinect Game

Abstract

Practicing is very important in the process of learning physics. Experiencing physics laws and observing the phenomenon in the experiments and labs help students learn. However, some contexts like the law of orbits in physics cannot be practiced directly and students can only learn it from animation or drawings. We have designed a Kinect game for students to experience orbital physics and conducted a pilot in a summer camp of Athabasca University's science outreach program to verify the hypotheses include whether the students' attitudes toward computer/video games will affect their perceptions toward the developed Kinect game or not, and whether their performance in the game will be influenced by the lack of prior knowledge of the law of orbits or not. The quantitative analysis results showed that there was a positive correlation between students' gaming performances and what they knew about the relevant physics knowledge. Also, it shows that the students' attitudes toward computer/video games do not affect their perceptions toward the developed Kinect game in terms of its usability.