4.По полученным данным определяется соответствующий угол, на котором находится проем, и вычисляется его размер.

5.Определение направления движения.

Данный алгоритм позволяет находить препятствия, определять размеры проемов, он гарантирует безошибочное распознавание объектов, что исключает столкновения и делает полет безопасным.

Следует отметить, что такая система технического зрения имеет возможности расширения, например, путем добавления новых датчиков в систему, таких как камера. Камера имеет ряд недостатков – требовательна к вычислительным ресурсам, сложна в программировании (алгоритмы обнаружения не гарантируют безошибочное распознавание, а также добавляют задержку между обнаружением препятствия и реакцией аппарата), в то же время, использование камеры позволяет мультикоптеру двигаться по меткам, распознавать зоны взлета и посадки, вести аэрофотосъемку.

В заключение отметим, что данная система позволяет избегать препятствий в автоматическом полете, а также при дистанционном управлении, таким образом корректируя ошибки оператора.

Работа выполнена в рамках минипроекта «Разработка системы управления автономного летающего робота на базе стандартной мультикоптерной платформы» программы стратегического развития ПетрГУ на 2012–2016 гг.

СЕКЦИЯ «ФИЗИКА И ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫЕ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ» (НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ)

KINECT TECHNOLOGY FOR EDUCATION

AND DEVELOPING RESEARCH THINKING

О. Э. Кулдавлетова, студ. 5 курса

Научный руководитель – начальник управления информационно- издательской деятельности А. С. Штыков

Games and education

In recent years technology has changed many aspects of the way we think, learn and live. As far as education is concerned, the classroom has no longer walls and boundaries; the young learners live through the information era and are considered as digital natives.

Powerful learning environments seem to be the key factor in education nowadays. Smeets (2005) argues that a powerful learning environment could

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be supported by active, independent and cooperative learning, from rich contexts and tasks which present links to the world outside school and through a curriculum adapted to the needs and capabilities of the pupils as individuals.

Video games can provide us with new, more powerful ways for teaching in schools, communities, and workplaces–new ways to learn within the new information age.

There are a lot of cognitive aspects that can be developed by good educational video games, such as vision, cognition, multitasking, processing speed, reaction, selective attention. One of the most important skills in the research thinking is system thinking and setting goals and aims. System thinking can be defined as considering all parts of a system, but also considering the system as a whole and interactions between the parts.

Principles of a good educational game

Taking into account the cognitive qualities and how video games affect them, we can define some principles that should be considered while designing a game.

The first principle is called “Co-design” and it means that the actions of a user are important. In good learning, the learners must feel like what they do matters. Even in playing a game, players are co-designing the game because what they do affects the game. The decisions players make, the actions they take, and how they play affects the outcome, and affects the way players solve problems in this game.

“Fish tank” says that a game should be started with easy and common things, and the complexity should be added step by step. Good games or good educational systems do not present you the full array of complexity and of the role system. They strip it down to a few variables that users understand clearly.

Another principle for how to set up good problem based learning (that games use and that is used in education with or without games) is the principle called “Sandbox”. The principle says that a user should feel free and safe to try and practice. The environment is created in a way that players can explore it, can take risks and try things without immediately being endangered or judged, sorted or ranked.

“Well-ordered problems” give learners the possibility not only to learn facts, but to learn to solve problems. Each level is meant to teach players how to solve a problem that will lead to even better solutions for harder problems on next levels, so this is a very important principle for how the human mind and learning work.

The next principle to make problem-solving successful is the one that can be called “Pleasant frustration”. It means that every problem a player faces with is not a stress, but a challenge. It is keeping the problem at the cutting

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edge of what some people call the Regime of Competence, that is, within your Regime of Competence you know you can do, but at the edge of it, so it feels like a challenge and an accomplishment when you succeed.

Another principle says that all the information given needs to be applied by a player. Information is effective for people when it is given either just in time or given on demand.

The last principle is developing system thinking. In the modern world, most problems we face, most hard problems, have to do with complex systems, they have to do with things like the environment, the economy, global immigration, science. System thinking and model based reasoning, that is building a model in your head of how variables interact, are the foundation of scientific reasoning.

Phases of making a game

While creating a game developers always pass some phases. The process can be basically divided into three steps, which are: a concept phase, a design phase, and a prototyping phase. A concept phase is the phase when the idea of a game appears and developers start collecting information about the topic, the concept of a game, the technologies that can possibly be used. When the concept is chosen, a developer needs to choose the most suitable technology and to define the whole structure of a game. This phase is called the design phase and includes thinking of the complete design of a game. A prototyping phase follows the designing phase and includes applying the design, developed at the previous phase, to make a real functional system. That is when a prototype is created. After that this prototype can be tested to find out things that should be changed, improved or added.

Kinect technology

The Xbox 360 Kinect technology is an innovative tool that can be used not only for fun, but also for learning and interaction among users. Kinect is a motion sensor, implemented by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. The device provides a natural user interface that allows users to interact without any intermediary device, such as a controller. The Kinect system identifies individual players through face and voice recognition.

The Kinect contains three vital pieces that work together to detect motion and create physical image on the screen: RGB color VGA video camera to give a flat colorful image, a depth sensor to give depth and capture a player in an environment and a multi-array microphone to capture the voice of a player. The camera detects the red, green, and blue color components as well as body-type and facial features. A depth sensor uses infrared light projector and a monochrome sensor to create the three-dimensional space. It also measures the distance of each point of the player’s body to capture controlling gestures.

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The microphone is actually an array of four microphones that can isolate the voices of the player from other background noises allowing players to use their voices as an added control feature.

The Kinect has its application in gaming, robotics, science, art and education.

There is an alternative for the Kinect. The camera Asus Xtion Live Pro developed by Asus uses the same technology as the Kinect, called “PrimeSense”. This camera has SDK included to let the developers use the camera in their own applications.

The Greek Ministry of Education (2003) states in the official Kindergarten’s curriculum that the goal in the primary education is to facilitate the physical, emotional, cognitive and social development of children. The Kinect-based games have the possibility to develop all of these aspects. There are already a number of games for education and children development. There is an educator-driven community resource for developers, teachers, students, enthusiasts, and any other education stakeholder to promote the use of Kinect applications in classrooms. KinectEDucation is not affiliated with Microsoft and their goal is to promote a “connected education”. In spite of that fact, there are not that many games, based on scientific topic and letting the children learn and practice their knowledge, developing the scientific and research thinking.

The aim of our work is to develop an educational game, based on the mo- tion-capture technology for the PetrSU Science Museum. The unattainable objects like the stars, volcanoes, body cells would be presented in the virtual exposition of the Museum. The visitors would be able not only to watch them or get some information about their structure, but also to interact with these objects, learn by this interaction and try to build their own stars, volcanoes etc.

References

1.Marina Kandroudi, Tharrenos Bratitsis, Exploring the Educational Perspectives of XBOX Kinect Based Video Games, Early Childhood Education Department, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, Greece, 2013.

2.Educator-driven community resource for the Kinect developers, URL:

http://www. kinecteducation.com

3.Prensky M. Digital game-based learning, New York: McGraw Hill,

2001.

4.Jameco Electronics: URL: https://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/

howitworks/xboxkinect.html

5. Games based learning blog: URL: http://www.games-based-learning. com/

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