WiiLab: Bringing together the Nintendo Wiimote and MATLAB

It is often a daunting task for engineering students to learn programming. Learning by playing has proven to be an effective way to engage students at nearly all levels of the curriculum. In this work, we will describe how we developed modules for teaching MATLAB to freshmen engineers through the use of the Nintendo Wiimote and motion capture. Through the work of a summer REU project, we developed and prototyped a unified set of C# and MATLAB libraries for Windows entitled WiiLab. In particular, the work focused on creating an easy-to-use API that largely abstracted the complexity of interacting with the Wiimote. In the work, we describe several laboratory modules developed for WiiLab and experiences from using the Wiimote in a four hundred student freshmen engineering course.