Design and Evaluation of Embodied Interaction in Virtual Reality for Learning Derivatives

Abstract

Mathematics can be difficult for students as they often struggle to connect the abstract mathematical concepts with their experience and therefore think that the learning content has no connection to the real world. To help concretize, we focused on the body and developed em- bodied interactions for learning derivatives. The embodied game encompasses three different gestures to play the game. These were inspired from a conducted qualitative interview study observing experts, novices and teachers in their gestural communication. A prototype was developed to explore the degree and the different types of embodied interactions in virtual reality. The usability of the three designed gestures were evaluated in a quantitative user study. We conclude with recommendation for using embodied interactions in the context of mathematical education.