iDance Dances It's Way Into Cortland

I attended the iDance workshop last week in Park Center. The workshop consisted of a 3-5 instructional session and two 8-10 testing sessions. The 3-5 session taught us how to use the equipment of iDance and what we would need to set it up in a school setting. iDance is very cool and fun to play because it allows a large amount of people to play on one screen. It is played on a game pad that is similar to the one of Dance Dance Revolution. The pad is hard, and apparently indestructible) and has four arrows for each direction. The screen can show the statistics of 32 people at one time. The statistics show the percentage of correct steps hit, how many steps were late and how many steps were early. It also shows you the amount of steps that you have taken all together in that session. All of this information can be recorded and saved to see progression. During the 8-10 session, 18 people were hooked up to heart rate monitors and put through different levels of iDance. There was a monitor that went in between the rib cages and also a watch on our wrist that showed our heart rate at all times. In between some of the levels, surveys were given that recorded how we felt about the activity as well as our fatigue level. Hopefully this information and statistics will be available to see because I'm very interested in seeing mine!

"Successful games are ones that are fun and promote one's competence, autonomy, and relatedness. iDance is unique in that it does support all four of these elements all within a physically challenging dance game."

Dr. Stephen Yang, M.S., PhD-ABD
Assistant professor at SUNY Cortland