Can Aikido Help With the Comprehension of Physics? A First Step Towards the Design of Intelligent Psychomotor Systems for STEAM Kinesthetic Learning Scenarios

Educational stakeholders are promoting the development of educational approaches that go beyond classroom and engage learners in acquiring science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) concepts with the support of arts (known as STEAM). Taking into account the recent advances in wearable technology to sense human motion, psychomotor intelligent tutoring systems (where students' motion interactions are collected with sensors and used to provide personalized vibrotactile feedback to support the learning process) can be designed to teach STEM concepts in a kinesthetic way. In order to investigate the feasibility of this approach, in this paper we have carried out an empirical study with high school students to determine if watching specific techniques of the defense martial art Aikido (which makes use of different types of rectilinear and curvilinear motion) can be used to learn some concepts of physics. Nonetheless, other martial arts could be used for similar purposes, but further studies are needed. Analyzing the outcomes of the 30 participants that took part in the study, we conclude that the proposed approach seems to have benefits in the learning of STEM concepts, and thus, the usage of martial arts deserves to be further investigated in STEAM kinesthetic learning scenarios, which can also consider the students' affective state.