Development of gesture recognition-based educational dance game for children with intellectual disability

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop an educational dance game for children. Successful experience on the stage improves the confidence of the participants. People with intellectual disabilities also have personal satisfaction and confidence as they finish the stage with dance and theater. However, during the process of explaining the movement, it is not easy to maintain a constant interest for the children with intellectual disabilities in the dance class. Children with intellectual disability are struggling with participating in dance class because of their low ability of body awareness. This makes children with the intellectual disability more inactive in dance class. Gesture recognition-based interface is an excellent educational tool to make students more active. This game contains 40 different dance pose images. The children match their head, hands, and legs to the images’ pose. The game was conducted at the intellectual disability child education center of the Lords of the Republic of Korea. The following results were obtained after conducting the dance lesson using a game. When children align their poses with the pose of the photo, they give auditory feedback as a means of praise and score the number of poses matched. In the dance lesson using these games, the children with intellectual disabilities were very interested in the appearance of their own images on TV. In addition, the children were more interested and actively participated in the class than the existing dance class. The use of Kinect in the dance lessons of children with intellectual disabilities is a good tool to increase students’ interest and excitement.