Development of educational camera games for children

By analyzing the educational effects of computer games on children´s physical and mental development, this paper brings forward the guidelines for developing educational camera games, which consists of specifying target group, topics, objects, rules, outcomes and interaction style, and proposing an organization chart. The paper focuses on the computer vision-based interaction style, which combines the robustness improvement of moving object detection by an adaptive threshold, the moving object tracking based on modified contrast context histogram feature, and finally the gesture recognition based on the nearest neighbor. This novel design not only enables children to interact with the game world more naturally and directly, but facilitates some physical exercise meanwhile. Results show that this type of computer games can stimulate children´s interest more effectively and supply them with more motivation to cope with learning.