An interactive virtual education program to learn objects for pre-school children

Pre-school period plays an important role for the development of mental, social and emotional capabilities of children. In this period, games are the indispensable tools for the education of children. Children obtain required learning materials via games. A critical subject in this period is intelligence which develops very fast in early years and reaches a steady-state and may degrade at later stages of life. For these reasons, early years in children?s life are very important for mind improvement and efforts should be spend to increase it.In this work, we developed a simulation program for children to improve their mental capabilities by concept and object learning as well as to familiarize them computers and its virtual worlds. The program uses objects and colors suitable for children who have not yet started school education. Developed program enables children to touch and manipulate objects on computer screen using keyboard and mouse. The aim of the program is then, to help children to improve their mental capabilities using objects with different shapes and colors.The simulation platform includes four different object, sphere, cube, prism and torus, and four holders to put them in. The play has different levels prepared based on educational theorems for these ages. At the first stage, children can touch the virtual objects, and can rotate and move them in 3D space. At following levels, users are required to pick and object and move-rotate it in order to put in the correct box which could be the same or different color with object.In addition, we developed a deformation algorithm based on mass-spring chain algorithm to be used to deform object if any collision occurs between the object and its environment. The deformation algorithm is capable of physically realistic modeling of the objects and simulating them I real time.