This project began at UMBC, where Dr. Anthony advised Samyukta Ganesan, a former UMBC HCC Master’s student as an independent study and then independent research. Earlier, this project investigated ways to design and develop exergames (“exercise games”) for older adults by taking into account their attitudes towards exercise, staying active, technology, and games. The complete original UMBC work can be found here.
Now, at University of Florida, the project has been expanded to designing exergames for children that can sustain their motivation to exercise in the long-term. We conducted focus groups with local kids who have varying levels of interest and motivation regarding exercise or games to learn what we can learn from them about designing exergames that can appeal to children for a long period. Additionally, we conducted interview with a physical education teacher to understand how to design exergames that can sustain children’s motivation in the long-term. Our findings showed that children and PE teachers viewed elements to include in exergames from different lenses: children viewed elements from a lens of fun while the PE teacher viewed elements from a lens of effectiveness. For example, even though both children and the PE teacher wanted exergames to provide “feedback”, children wanted “visual feedback through animation” while the PE teacher wanted “expert feedback through guidance and instruction.” Findings from our focus groups with children and interview with a PE teacher will appear in the upcoming proceedings of the 2020 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (PDF). We plan to continue to work with physical education teachers and other individuals who are invested in the problem of children’s fitness, such as sport coaches, to design exergames that can sustain children’s long-term motivation to exercise.
The Team
Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Gianne Flores (Former member)
Ian Mayne (Former member)
Jaida Langham (Former member)
Zari McFadden (Former member)
Nikita Dagar (Former member)
Samyukta Ganesan (Former member)
Sydney Richardson(Former member)
Papers
1. Aloba, A., Flores, G., Langham, J., McFadden, Z., Bell, J., Dagar, N., Esmaeili, S., and Anthony, L. 2020. Toward Exploratory Design with Stakeholders for Understanding Exergame Design. In Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘2020). Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, USA, April 25-20, Pages 1–8. [PDF]
2. Ganesan, S. and Anthony, L. 2012. Using the Kinect to Encourage Older Adults to Exercise: A Prototype. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2012), Austin, TX, 5 May 2012, p.2297-2302. [Pdf] [Poster]
Demos
Summer 2015 FunFitTech Project Demo
INIT Kinect Games for Exercise Demo
You can find more videos on the project here