Teaching movement science with full-body motion-capture in an undergraduate liberal-arts psychology class

Abstract

Movement science is a field that is quickly growing in its scope, leaning heavily on psychological expertise for research design with human participants but requiring computational and engineering ability. Undergraduate psychology curricula are in a unique position to train some of its future scholars. This report reviews an attempt to pilot a class on motion-capture for undergraduate psychology students. Recent developments in motion-capture technology have opened up the opportunity for giving hands-on experience with high-quality motion capture for students at liberal-arts colleges with lean research budgets. Post-course responses to the Research on Integrated Science Curriculum (RISC) survey demonstrated that our students made significantly large gains in their ability to organize an empirical approach to studying a complex problem with no clear solution, and to collect and analyze data to produce a coherent insight about that problem. Students may benefit from incorporating motion-capture into their undergraduate psychology curriculum.