Smart Technology for Supporting Dance Education

Abstract

My PhD project sits in the design space that investigates how smart technology can support dance education. My aim is to design, implement and evaluate a conceptual and technological solution that captures students' movement using wearable devices and help dance teachers and students enhance their awareness and promote reflection regarding dance skills acquisition using automated personalised feedback (charts, tables, text, etc.). I will explore how to acquire movement data that can represent key aspects of social dance learning, and how to use these data to support of students and teachers. For this, I created a mobile app that records students' movement while they are practicing dance exercises and creates a dance learner model. The learner model's features are exposed through the Open Learner Model to students and their teachers in order to support reflection and increase awareness. With the proposed work I expect to generate a deeper understanding of the aspects of the dance learner model which can be used to promote personalization and adaptation, and positively impact dance learning.