“What Should We Do With All These Webcams?” a Low-Cost Motion Capture System for Embodied, Ensemble Learning in Mixed-Reality Mathematics Activities

Abstract

As schools in the United States begin to reopen, mathematics teachers are presented with renewed opportunities to design activities rooted in embodied cognition. This project repurposes webcams bought for emergency remote teaching to create a low-cost, motion capture system to 1.) support embodied play for teaching mathematics in K-12 classrooms, and 2.) build on theories of embodied cognition (Núñez et al., 1999), collaborative ensembles (Ma, 2016), and gestures and viewpoints (DeLiema et al., 2021).