Kinderuniversiteit (Children's University)
Since a few years, we organize a workshop for children where they program a game to steer a fish with their eye gaze.
Image credit: Geert Vanden WijngaertFor multiple years, we run a workshop for children in the context of the Kinderuniversiteit to let them taste the world of programming and brain decoding. It was originally developed by Rob Zink, Bori Hunyadi and others.
In this workshop, children from 8 to 13 years old use Scratch to first program a game like Fish Eat Getting Big, where they have to control a fish to dodge a shark while growing bigger when eating other fish.
We then teach them a little bit about brain decoding and electrodes, as the end goal is for the children to control the fish in the game with their eye gaze. After learning to attach and connect the electrodes the electrodes to the game, they have to interpret the EOG signals and choose thresholds to decode eye gaze.
In the end, they’ve implemented their own eye gaze-steered video game! We let them play in pairs, where one controls up-down with the keyboard, and the other one controls left-right with their eyes. Always ends up in fun chaos!
Every year, the regional television reports about the Children’s University. This report features our workshop (from 01:00; in Dutch):
Simon Geirnaert
Postdoctoral researcher
My research interests include signal processing algorithm design for multi-channel biomedical sensor arrays (e.g., electroencephalography) with applications in attention decoding for brain-computer interfaces.