14 DAY TRIAL // One of these days, I'm going to have to stop criticizing the Wii. Some games are just too simple with the Wii, yes, I'll stand by that forever, but the infinity of ways in which its motion sensitive capabilities can be used, is something to praise. As such, according to Hardwarezone.com, Maurizio Vannoni from the Instituto Nazionale di Ottica Applicata and Samuele Straulino from the Universit? di Firenze realized that the Wii remote was the perfect tool to teach students about mechanics.
As the site informs, Vannoni's work has a lot to do with optical testing, interferometry and holography. Straulino, on the other hand, has carried out work on cosmic-ray physics and satellites. He is currently working on the OpenLab Project. But why did the two decide to use a Wii Remote for their experiments? The same website provides us the answer: "Usually, accelerometers are expensive items for classrooms, and not readily available to most teachers," whilst the Wii's controller is something even your dog can get his mitts on. Or teeth.
"Similar projects have been already proposed using a simple mouse," Straulino told PhysOrg.com in an interview. "We therefore realized that a more sophisticated controller (like the Wii Remote) could be also more useful in developing simple experiments to be done with secondary school students."
Here's what the respective science lesson was all about: "In general, accelerometers are used for measuring acceleration, including gravitational acceleration," Hardwarezone.com reports. "The Wii remote has a three-axis accelerometer, allowing it to measure a player's movements along three axes (such as in a tennis game). A monochrome camera on the front of the device can locate and track up to four infrared (IR) LED sources, further enabling the device to evaluate its own relative position.
To teach students concepts in dynamics and kinematics such as force, velocity and acceleration, Vannoni and Straulino used the intact Wii remote to measure acceleration of a swinging pendulum. They connected the remote to a PC via Bluetooth, and used software to interpret data from the accelerometers to numerically and graphically calculate the pendulum's position, velocity, and acceleration."
Again, the Wii has its good parts and its bad parts. The fact that the Wii Remote can help students better understand mechanics is indeed something to praise Nintendo for, even though nothing on behalf of Nintendo was intentional here. But the Wii is primarily a gaming device. I wish I could write the same kind of positive news about it, but referring to its titles.