Project

Educational Dice

When a die is picked up, it attempts to teach patterns, progressions of patterns, numbers, counting, arithmetic, and probability depending on user successes. It gives instructions: "turn dice to find four" or "turn dice to add two." The tasks increase and decrease in difficulty based upon the user's success. The dice are adaptive educational toys for a range of ages and skill levels (from infant to third grade). This adaptive toy demonstrates a novel capacitive 3-D accelerometer. The water-filled vessel accelerometer is an inexpensively manufactured, low-technology way to measure orientation. Water within a cavity sloshes to be close to capacitive plates on various sides of the accelerometer. A micro-computer compares capacitances of the sides of the tetrahedron or cube cavity to determine its orientation. The dice use this novel capacitive, tetrahedral, position sensor, as well as voice feedback and adaptive user modeling to teach mathematical relations in a progressive manner.