3D Interactive Racing, McKinley Technology High School and Dassault Systèmes

My name is Jeff Kelsey and I am a third-year Interactive Media teacher at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC.

First, about our program: McKinley Technology High school is a public school that aims to provide the best technology education to high school students in Washington DC. We have a Career and Technical Education program that allows students to take technical courses in addition to their core course work. One area where students can take extra course work is in Interactive Media, where students gain a mix of experience in 3-dimensional modeling, 3-d animation, and programming using software such as Virtools Dev 4.0.

Picture 1: Jeff Kelsey, Teacher Interactive Media

Figure 2- Students use Virtools in Interactive Media to gain a foothold in 3D Graphics and Programming

Figure 1- A student works on a difficult assignment in McKinley Tech HS’ Interactive Media class

Our goal is to motivate and prepare students for a college program in computer science or another technical field without boring them or scaring them away with traditional “command line” computer science courses. This semester, student have used Virtools Dev 4.0 to create many interactive 3d simulations and games such as a 3d solar system explorer, interactive characters, and using random numbers to make simulations more interesting. See our Virtual School and other recent projects on you-tube by following this link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/458258m/

Now about our new project. To coincide with Mr. Phillipe Fuchs’ impressive run from Paris to Beijing, we have purchased 20 PCGamer Bikes: Small, portable stationary bikes that connect to computers through the USB Port.

Figure 3- The PC Gamer Bike Connects to a computer through the USB port

I have built a custom Virtools building block that reads data from the Bike. Using this block, the students are responsible for creating applications that display this data and use it to control their applications.

Figure 4-The Get Bike Data Building Block, allows students to get data such as pedal speed, Distance, and Calories burned from their mini bikes and use it to create interactive applications in virtools.

For Mr. Fuchs’ run, we would like to have students control a 3d avatar running through a simulation of the towns Mr. Fuchs will be visiting on that specific day. More on this project below.

As a primer for this assignment, in today’s class(3/3- 3/4), we are using the bikes to make the planet earth rotate at different speeds and display this data on the screen. We also use lighting to simulate the night/day effect on the earth. Please see the video of this assignment to see how students use Virtools and c++ code to control their earth using the bikes.

The Fuchs Assignment – Beginning on March 6th

For Each Day of Mr. Fuchs’ run( if it coincided with a class day), we will have students view which towns/cities Mr. Fuchs will be running through on that particular day. Download pictures that we can find of these towns, bring these photos into an interactive race simulation The students will then bike as far as they can for the last 15 minutes of class, and we will display the individual and aggregate data online. Our goal is to have students (aggregate) travel the same distance as Mr. Fuchs has run on that day. Please watch our Fuchs Run demo:

If you want to learn more about McKinley Technical High School, please visit http://mths.k12.dc.us. Also, please check out our Saturday after-school program, the Institute of Urban Game Design, which is now expanding to 5 schools in Washington DC (http://www.bthegame.com )
I’d love to hear about similar work going on in other schools, so please send me your comments.

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