College of Saint Anthony

RHYTHM GAMES AS A TOOL OF IMPROVING HAND-EYE

COORDINATION OF STUDENTS IN COLLEGE OF SAINT ANTHONY S.Y.
2021-2022

A Qualitative Research
presented to the Senior High School Department of the
COLLEGE OF SAINT ANTHONY
City of San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements in Practical Research 1 for
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

Cabelin, Jonhel Christian F.

Tercero, Charles Christian M.

Grade 11 - Zara
Group Number

MS. SHIELA MAE P. LAGUNA

Research Adviser

November 19, 2020

 College of Saint Anthony
APPROVAL SHEET

This Research Paper hereto entitled:

“ The Effect of Rhythm Games on the Hand-Eye Coordination of selected high-school

students of College of Saint Anthony S.Y. 2021-2022 ”

prepared and submitted by Cabelin, Jonhel Christian F., and Tercero, Charles Christian
M.

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the subject

Practical Research 1

has been examined, recommended, and passed the ORAL DEFENSE.

_____________________________
Research Adviser

Approved and panelled by:

_____________________________
Research Panelist

Recognized by the School Department Heads:

____________________________

School Assistant Principal

____________________________

School Principal
College of Saint Anthony

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

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 College of Saint Anthony
ABSTRACT

The research is about rhythm games and how it can help with the hand-eye coordination

of the students in college of Saint Anthony.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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 College of Saint Anthony
Chapter I
INTRODUCTION

In this research paper, the topic that we are going to study deals with the effect

of reaction time by playing rhythm games to certain individuals.

Background of the Study

To break the introduction down, we must first identify what is being studied

here. First off, the definition of reaction time. According to the Merriam-Webster

Dictionary, reaction time is “the time elapsing between the beginning of the application

of a stimulus and the beginning of an organism’s reaction to it.” The next one is rhythm

games. Now, what does this mean? A rhythm game is a genre of music-themed action

video game that utilizes the difficulty of the game by making the players challenge

themselves to press or tap to the beat, depending on the rhythmic patterns of the beat or

the song.

Statement of the Problem

The problems that we aim to solve are the following:

1. How can rhythm games help improve hand-eye coordination?

2. What’s the difference of an average person to a rhythm game player in

terms of reaction time?

3. How can playing rhythm games compare to when you are just playing

normal sports in terms of hand-eye coordination?

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Significance of the Study

The significance of this study is to help the readers know how games like these

influence our hand-eye coordination and how it can improve that specific skill.

1. To the learners/readers - to learn the possible benefits and have a reason to

play rhythm games.

2. To game makers - To make better rhythm games that can have better benefits

for your body.

3. To the future researchers - To help them when they are going to do a research

about rhythm games.

Scope and Delimitation

This research study will solely focus on selected students in College of Saint

Anthony. Our study will only look at the data of how much the hand-eye coordination

of these students have improved or how much it worsened. 

The researchers are limited to the Anthonian population because it is more

convenient and manageable since the information is readily available in our school. We

are also limiting it to the Anthonians since we want to give the students who play

competitive sports to give another way of training their hand-eye coordination.

The rhythm games the researchers are going to do tests with are not specified

since there may be different types of players with different skills. For example, student

A is better at the dance rhythm games rather than the clicking rhythm games. So we will

use the game that they perform best at.

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Chapter 2
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

This chapter of the paper presents the review of related literature, the conceptual

framework, the research hypotheses, and the definition of terms.

Related Literature

According to Titchener, S. et al. (2018), “shifting the region or the sight of

interest of the eye to compensate gaze shifts may improve hand-eye coordination. On

another study, Pang C. defines rhythm games as a type of video game which requires

players to interact through physical actions on the gaming device such as swiping and

pressing on certain parts of the gaming console in order to match the rhythm of the

music. Begel V. et al.(2017) states that listening to an auditory rhythm, such as music,

can activate movement-related areas of the brain to have a rhythmic stimulus, which

will be beneficial to (re)activate the motor system in both the damaged and the healthy

brain.”

Rhythm can affect a lot of parts in our daily lives. According to Baaroy F. A.

(2018), “Many people probably don’t think about it much, but rhythm is extremely

important in almost everything we do. Rhythm is necessary for understanding events in

time, for engaging in dialogue and for coordinating and synchronizing ourselves with

one another,” “Just take walking for example. Or running. These involve two different

types of rhythm. If you run in the company of others, you start to synchronise your steps
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with theirs. If you listen to music, then you may have an extra dimension to synchronise

with.”

A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience confirmed that the

cerebellum coordinates eye and hand tracking movements. The researchers used

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during visually guided tracking tasks

that required varying degrees of hand-eye coordination, in the words of Bergland C.

(2013) "The researchers found that the cerebellum was more active during independent

rather than coordinated eye and hand tracking. However, in three further tasks, they also

found increases in cerebellar blood oxygenation as hand-eye coordination increased."

Said Bergland C. (2013)

In the words of the scholars Chen Y. et al., "The coordination of visual attention

among social partners is central to many components of human behavior and human

development." This provides us information that visual attention and coordination,

otherwise called hand-eye coordination, is an important factor to our human

development, whether it be our senses or behavior.

Victor S. J. et. al. (2014) also found that "the gaze proactively coordinates the

pattern of eye-arm motion during obstacle avoidance. This study provides also a

quantitative assessment of the coupling between the eye-arm-hand motion. We show

that the coupling follows regular phase dependencies and is unaltered during obstacle

avoidance." "Our controller extends the coupled dynamical systems framework and

provides fast and synchronous control of the eyes, the arm and the hand within a single
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and compact framework, mimicking similar control system found in humans." These

researchers found a way to make a robot that can mimic the movements that are humans

unique of having.”

According to the Henriques D Y P et al (2002), they have "Explored the

possibility that the eye-hand coordination system uses a strategy like ocular dominance,

but switches alignment between the left and right eye in order to maximize eye-hand

coordination in the best field of view. Finally, we describe the influence of eye position

on eye-hand alignment, and then consider how head orientation influences the linkage

between oculo centric visual frames and body centric motor frames." They have found

what strategy the brain uses for hand-eye coordination and how exactly it works.

Games are also another effective way to improve hand-eye coordination.

According to Alex, "Video games may do more than just entertain. A study from the

University of Toronto finds that people who regularly play action video games, like Call

of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, are better able to learn new sensorimotor tasks, improve

hand-eye coordination, than people who do not play video games. The results suggest

that video games could be part of treatments for people who struggle with hand-eye

coordination or sensorimotor skills in general." It shows that video games can be helpful

in improving our hand-eye coordination.

Rhythm games are also really helpful to the rhythmic abilities of an individual.

According to the results found by Zanto T. P. et. al. (2019) "Results supported the

validity of this approach to assessing rhythmic abilities by replicating previously

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observed results. Specifically, musicians performed better than non-musicians, and

younger adults performed better than older adults. Participants also performed best

when the tempo was in the range of previously-identified preferred tempos, when the

stimuli included both audio and visual information, and when synchronizing on-beat

compared to off-beat or continuation (self-paced) synchronization.

Additionally, high ICC values (>0.75) suggested excellent test–retest reliability.

Together, these results support the notion that consumer electronics running software

built with a game engine may serve as a valuable resource for remote, mobile-based

data collection of rhythmic abilities." Both head/eye and hand centered representations

are egocentric because they specify visual coordinates with respect to the subject. The

results reveal that accuracy and reliability of both motor and perceptual responses are

highest when subjects direct their response towards a visible target location, which

allows them to rely on a representation of the target in head/eye-centered coordinates.

Systematic changes in averages and standard deviations of responses are

observed when subjects cannot direct their response towards a visible target location,

but have to represent target distance and direction in either hand-centered or allocentric

visual coordinates instead. Subjects' motor and perceptual performance agree

quantitatively well. These results strongly suggest that subjects process head/eye-

centered representations differently from hand-centered or allocentric representations,

but that they process visual information for motor actions and perceptual judgments

together.
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There was an experiment on hand-eye coordination trying to find out what was

the better ways of improving the said skill. An experiment done by Adam J. J. showed

that “Reaching to targets in space requires the coordination of eye and hand movements.

In two experiments, we recorded eye and hand kinematics to examine the role of gaze

position at target onset on eye-hand coordination and reaching performance."

"Experiment 1 showed that with eyes and hand aligned on the same peripheral

start location, time lags between eye and hand onsets were small and initiation times

were substantially correlated, suggesting simultaneous control and tight eye-hand

coupling. With eyes and hand departing from different start locations (gaze aligned with

the center of the range of possible target positions), time lags between eye and hand

onsets were large and initiation times were largely uncorrelated, suggesting independent

control and decoupling of eye and hand movements" "Experiment 2 confirmed the

impact of target foveation in modulating the effect of target distance on movement

time."

Further studies such as Burke's case study has stated the following; "the nature

of the stimuli that is used and how it is presented play key roles in determining subject

performance and behavior during spatial memory tasks." Diving through the study,

analysis of the response phase revealed subjects were less accurate and fixated longer

when responding to sequentially presented targets suggesting higher cognitive effort.

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Through the research of Crawford and his colleagues (2017) they have shown

that behavioral experiments show that the brain deals with the nonlinear aspects of such

reference frame transformations and incorporates internal models of the complex

linkage geometry of the eye-head-shoulder system.

Conceptual Framework

Our conceptual framework shows the population, the process that’s going to happen and

the expected data that we are gonna get. First is the population, we are going to get

different kinds of populations depending on their experience playing rhythm games and

people who play sports to know whether these games help. The next one is the process

which is the test that we are going to conduct on the population. And lastly, the results,

the data/output we are going to be basing the performances on. With this data, we can

answer the questions to our statement of the problem.

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Research Hypothesis

The hypothesis that we have come up with is that rhythm games aids a person to

improve his or her own hand-eye coordination through playing them.

This is because rhythm games are games that require good hand-eye

coordination in order to execute properly. Which is why we are hypothesizing that

rhythm games can help with the hand-eye coordination.

Definition of Terms

These are the variables that we would discuss throughout this study:

1. Rhythmcgames – These are the games that we would like to see if it is effective in

terms of hand-eye coordination.

2. Hand-eye Coordination – The skill that this research is centered around. It will show

how the rhythm games affect the skill in any way.

ALPHABETICAL ORDER
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Chapter 3
METHODOLOGY

This chapter includes the research design, the sample, the instruments, the

intervention (if research is experimental), the data collection procedure, and the plan for

data analysis.

Research Design

The research we are doing qualifies as a qualitative research since we are

describing the data that we are going to obtain through words and comparisons.

First, we will get a relevant population to test for our research. Then we will

establish the hand-eye-coordination test to the population we are testing. We will then

evaluate the data based on the numbers that we got on the tests. We will analyze our

data by making a table that is based on the scoring system that is on the hand-eye-

coordination test. The data will be shown in a table that shows a clear comparison of the

different data.

The Sample

The people we are going to sample are the students in high school. The

population are going to be located in the Philippines, specifically in San Jose Del

Monte, Bulacan. And they will all be studying in the College of Saint Anthony. We will

need at least 3 people for this research who fits these categories:

1. People who regularly play rhythm games and have experience playing it.
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2. People who have never any rhythm games and are considered “average”

3. People who are physically active and play sports regularly.

We will facilitate a survey in order to find the most appropriate samples to get

the most desired data.

The Instrument(s)

The way we will gather data is through the hand-eye-coordination test. Which

needs a tennis ball and a timer? The way you do this test is:

1. Stand at least 10 feet away from a wall.

2. Throw the tennis ball with your hand and catch it with your other hand

3. Then the tester will count how many balls you caught with the timer set to 30

seconds.

4. The test will be evaluated by this system :

Over 35 Excellent

30 to 35 Above Average

25 to 29 Below Average

Below 20 Low

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaK5dFGuMNA
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Data Collection Procedure

The instruments will be provided by the researchers since these instruments are

found at our everyday lives.

1. Tennis Balls - People who do any physical activities have these in their homes

2. Timer - Can be a cellular phone or a watch, anything that can record the time
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Bibliography

Baarøy F. A. (November 29, 2018) ; A sense of rhythm - why do we have it and what
does it mean to us? ; Forskningsveien 3A Retrieved From :
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Pang C. (September 12, 2019) ; The Rhythm Game World of Japanese Arcades ; Sugoi
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