Developed by Professor Dor Abrahamson and two scientists at the Copernicus Science Centre (CSC) in Warsaw, Poland, Katarzyna Potęga vel Żabik and Ilona Iłowiecka‐Tańska, OЯTHO challenges players to collaboratively navigate a virtual ball through maze-like paths, with the objective of completing the course in the shortest time and with the fewest moves.
“OЯTHO is productive fun struggle, together, with an added value of discovering a challenging math concept, while developing empathy for the other player,” Abrahamson said. “The task itself is much harder than it looks.”
The mathematical foundation of OЯTHO is the Cartesian coordinate system — an essential concept for understanding graphs, maps, and models. Along with assessing the individual learning that happens when playing OЯTHO, Abrahamson and his colleagues are also gathering multimodal sensorimotor data, such as players’ actions, speech, gestures, and eye-gaze paths, to evaluate cutting-edge theoretical models of cognition that foreground the constitutive role of perception and action in conceptual development.
Somewhat reminiscent of Etch-a-Sketch ©, OЯTHO requires one player to be in charge of the object’s vectorial trajectory along the x-axis, and the other player controls the object’s vectorial trajectory along the y-axis. Together, the players move the object anywhere in the quadrant
What’s more, the players don’t need to speak the same language to engage with the activity. The influx of Ukrainian children into neighboring Poland in recent years has challenged Polish teachers, many of whom don’t speak Ukrainian, Abrahamson said.
“The two players depend on each other for overall success and need to somehow communicate their ideas in real time and learn from considering what the other person has just done and is trying to do, all this without a common language,” Abrahamson said.
OЯTHO is part of the LivingLab at the Copernicus Science Centre, one of the largest science museums in Europe. It is home to a planetarium, a research center, and more than 400 hands-on activities. Since OЯTHO’s unveiling in May 2023, it has been played nearly half a million times, which is why Abrahamson’s big-data AI expert global collaborators are eager to pitch in and help with the research project. “It takes two hands to OЯTHO,” quips Abrahamson, “but we need all hands on deck for these massive data!”