A New Physical Education Teaching System and Training Framework Based on Human-Computer Interaction and Auxiliary Interaction

There is a major problem with off-class learning of physical education (PE): the lack of guidance on the students. This paper attempts to solve the problem, better arouse the interest of students in PE, further improve the quality of PE teaching, and promote the all-round development of students. After summarizing the traditional PE teaching and training framework, the authors constructed a universal PE teaching assistant training framework, based on motion capture and virtual reality (VR). The proposed framework is applicable to the PE teaching system embedded with human-computer interaction (HCI) and auxiliary interaction. Then, the PE course of martial arts was taken as the research object. Based on the learning requirements of martial arts learners and the function requirements of martial arts teaching system, the authors designed and implemented a PE teaching system based on HCI and auxiliary interaction. The results show that, through HCI, the proposed system can provide feedbacks to the real-time performance of learners, and enable the learners to find their errors in martial arts movements; all the design goals were realized by the system, namely, natural HCI, and assisted training and scoring of martial arts movements; the system clearly improves the learning experience and learning efficiency, and the research provides a good reference for other PE teaching systems.

Maximising university education through improved teaching assistant training

Teaching assistants (TAs) play a key role in helping undergraduate university students with their studies. However, there is a lack of formal training provided to TAs and their role is not always clearly defined. Project Associate Professor Mio Tsubakimoto, University of Tokyo, Japan, is seeking to make improvements to this situation by enhancing the education provided to TAs and, in the process, improving university education. FIrst, Tsubakimoto set out to understand the role played by TAs from the perspective of students, teachers and the TAs themselves and build a picture of the set of skills and techniques that make a good TA. To do this she qualitatively and quantitatively studied how the different classes and lectures that make up First Year Seminars (FYS) were taught, as well as surveying TAs, with a view to implementing improvements to TA training. These investigations led to the development and distribution of a guide for TA training and content that incorporates active learning. Following two years of training TAs using the guide, Tsubakimoto repeated the surveys in order to assess the ways in which the implementation of the guide had enhanced TA performance. She found that the presence of trained TAs led to improved student and faculty performance. The research underlined the benefits of the presence of trained TAs in the classroom for university learning, both for the students and for the TAs themselves, enabling them to reach their full potential.