Scientific English Education Using Haptic Rendering

Abstract

Formal language and scientific education methods have traditionally focused on visual and auditory sensory feedback to learners. The main issue of these approaches is how to encourage learners to participate actively in the learning process. Recently, multimodal sensory feedback including haptics has shown new opportunities to provide entirely different learning experiences. This research is in line with this recent research thrust aiming at learning improvement in scientific English for elementary students by using haptic feedback. We propose a scientific English education system utilizing a spoken dialogue technology and haptic force feedback rendering algorithms to teach physics phenomena. The system allows students to study in four science-related scenarios including a gravity game, a texture exploration scenario, a solar system and a kite simulation. In addition, we utilize 3-DOF and voxel-based 6-DOF haptic rendering algorithms to provide force feedback and torque feedback in these scenarios to learners to improve the realism of virtual environments. As a result, students can better understand and remember the related physics when the education involves movement and touch.