Cart Game

The idea of the cart game is to have a kid push their friend on a cart down a linear track while trying to create different kinds of motion, i.e. constant velocities and accelerations.



A laptop and camera oriented perpendicular to the track records the motion of the cart and plays back a video of the participant with hash marks that convey information about time, position, speed and acceleration as well as a bar that shows how much force is being applied at a given moment.

Screenshot of TV display when played outdoors. Click to enlarge.

The hash marks are dropped at regular time intervals allowing the user to deduce information about speed and acceleration. When moving at constant speed, the lines appear regularly spaced. When accelerating, the lines go from closely spaced at the beginning to wider spacing in the end (as seen above).

The idea is that students can use the near-real-time data, that doesnt look like data but instead like a fun game interface, to improve their motion to better resemble the ideal motion (the portion of the display) which is actually a constant velocity or acceleration profile.