MOCO EDU | Yoav Bergner, Willie Payne, Kayla DesPortes, Kathleen McDermott
Creating and developing with danceON
Our research collaborative has been developing movement computing educational technology experiences for the past three years. We have been building tools that simultaneously support both movement and computing learning objectives at entry-level. A recent iteration of this work is danceON, a domain-specific language and a web app that allows users to create interactive graphics overlaid on video from pre-recorded or live (webcam) sources. In a series of workshops that we propose to carry out over the coming year, we would like to invite creators and developers to use danceON, develop educational worked examples, propose improvements, and even develop their own feature extensions.
We envision this “workshop” spread out over several months in two tracks, each with two sessions lasting about 2-3 hours:
Creator Track (spring meetings, April/May or May/June) Part I: An introduction danceON for creators; tour of the interface; practice simple worked examples; setting up goals and expectations for documenting performance products that can be used as educational examples Part II: Sharing and discussing community-generated products
Developer Track (summer/fall, July-August or August-September) Part I: An introduction to danceON for a developer’s perspective; practice forking, building, and adding a simple interface feature Part II: Sharing and discussing community-generated features. Code reviews, comments, and pull requests.
Although our workshop is designed to focus on danceON as an initial workhorse, a central objective of ours is to gather members of the MOCO community who are interested in entry-level, educational tools for movement computing. Pending sufficient interest, this could result in a special interest group, e.g., MoCo.Edu, with collaboration on a wider set of learner-centered tools and experiences. These could likely include wearable devices, sonification tools, etc.
