Dance game

Dance mania melanda UKM

2009-02-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

Tamatlah sudah program selama seminggu mempromosi dance game dikalangan para siswa siswi ukm, yang terbukti mendapat sambutan yang menggalakkan. Program ini yang bermula pada hari isnin 16 haribulan Februari yg lepas di Pusanika UKM (ada team PC dance mat yg tersasul menyebut Puspanita)dan berakhir di Kolej Ibu Zain pada hari ahadnya, berjaya menyerlahkan bakat2 terpendam para bakal graduan yang rupa2nya kaki gelek..hehehe.

Namun apa yang penting, ia memperkenalkan satu bentuk senaman alternatif yang baru dan unik. bukan sahaja si pemain dapat menghilangkan stress setelah penat belajar malah dapat pula ia menyihatkan badan. Jikalau dahulu, ada sahaja alasan yang diberikan, seperti tidak ada masa, tak ada kasut, rutin senaman membosankan, tak ada kawan untuk menemankan, tapi kini tiada alasan lagi. Sebabnya dengan dance game, ia boleh dilakukan dimana sahaja walau berseorangan didalam bilik.

Aktiviti2 yang diadakan termasuklah pertandingan menari melawan adik mimi (anak sulung saya) yang diterbangkan khusus dari bandar baru bangi untuk program ini ke Kolej Ibu Zain. Mmm, nampaknya berpeluh-peluh dan berhempas pulas abang2 dan kakak2 kita cuba menewaskannya, yang walaupun baru berumur 8 tahun namun pergerakan kakinya sangat lincah di atas dance mat. Dalam berpuluh2 peserta yang mencuba nasib, hanya tiga orang berjaya mendapat markah yang lebih tinggi dari adik mimi. Tahniah diucapkan kepada Saudara Naim dan Wong, dan saudari Siti Salwani, kerana dengan hanya masa yang singkat dapat memahirkan diri dengan permainan ini.

Gambar sekitar program.

Ewah! Gelek jangan tak gelek.

Tengok tuh, macam2 gaya sudah keluar.

Muka2 puas hati lepas dapat hadiah.

Stepmania group on Facebook

2009-02-06T05:12:00.000-08:00

Come meet the other Stepmania fans on facebook.

Stepmania group

DDR to combat obesity

2009-01-30T02:35:00.000-08:00

I found this article from New York Times on how dance game (more popular known as DDR-Dance Dance Revolution) has benefited students in combating against obesity.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

Bill Hines, a physical education teacher at the school for 27 years, shook his head a little, smiled and said, “I’ll tell you one thing: they don’t run in here like that for basketball.”

It is a scene being repeated across the country as schools deploy the blood-pumping video game Dance Dance Revolution as the latest weapon in the nation’s battle against the epidemic of childhood obesity. While traditional video games are often criticized for contributing to the expanding waistlines of the nation’s children, at least several hundred schools in at least 10 states are now using Dance Dance Revolution, or D.D.R., as a regular part of their physical education curriculum.

Based on current plans, more than 1,500 schools are expected to be using the game by the end of the decade. Born nine years ago in the arcades of Japan, D.D.R. has become a small craze among a generation of young Americans who appear less enamored of traditional team sports than their parents were and more amenable to the personal pursuits enabled by modern technology.

Incorporating D.D.R. into gym class is part of a general shift in physical education, with school districts de-emphasizing traditional sports in favor of less competitive activities.

“Traditionally, physical education was about team sports and was very skills oriented,” said Chad Fenwick, who oversees physical education for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where about 40 schools now use Dance Dance Revolution. “What you’re seeing is a move toward activities where you don’t need to be so great at catching and throwing and things like that, so we can appeal to a wider range of kids.”

A basic D.D.R. system, including a television and game console, can be had for less than $500, but most schools that use the game choose to spend from $70 to $800 each for more robust mats, rather than rip apart the relatively flimsy versions meant for home use.

In a study last year, researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that children playing Dance Dance Revolution expended significantly more energy than children watching television and playing traditional video games. West Virginia, which ranks among the nation’s leaders in obesity, diabetes and hypertension, has sponsored its own study and has taken the lead in deploying the game, which requires players to dance in ever more complicated and strenuous patterns in time with electronic dance music.

As a song plays, arrows pointing one of four directions — forward, back, left, right — scroll up the screen in various sequences and combinations, requiring the player to step on corresponding arrows on a mat on the floor. Players can dance by themselves, with a partner or in competition. (Though the game, which is made by Konami of Japan, began in arcades, it is now most commonly played on Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles.)

As a result of a partnership among West Virginia’s Department of Education, its Public Employees Insurance Agency and West Virginia University, the state has committed to installing the game in all 765 of its public schools by next year. Almost all of its 185 middle schools already use it.

The mastermind behind the project is Linda M. Carson, Ware distinguished professor at West Virginia University’s School of Physical Education and director of the state’s Motor Development Center.

“I was in a mall walking by the arcade and I saw these kids playing D.D.R., and I was just stunned,” she said. “There were all these kids dancing and sweating and actually standing in line and paying money to be physically active. And they were drinking water, not soda. It was a physical educator’s dream.”

In February, Ms. Carson and her main collaborator, Emily Murphy, a doctoral candidate at the university’s School of Medicine, announced results of a multiyear study. They found significant health benefits for overweight children who played the game regularly, including improved blood pressure, overall fitness scores and endothelial function, which reflects the arteries’ ability to deliver oxygen.

None of that would come as a surprise to Maureen Byrne, mother of two boys in Chesterfield, Mo., who introduced the game to her local school district after seeing its impact on one of her sons.

“My oldest son, Sean, used to have love handles; he was kind of pudgy, and I’ll be honest: we were worried about it,” she said. “We had heard of D.D.R., and I got it for him for his birthday. We put limits on the other video games he plays, but we told him he could play D.D.R. as much as he wanted. And now it’s like he’s a different kid. He’s playing sports and running, and we see D.D.R. as like his bridge to a more active lifestyle.”

Ms. Byrne and her family demonstrated the game for the local parent-teacher organization in the hope of convincing it to underwrite a test at school.

“I remember going to the P.T.O. meeting and getting in front of all of them without my shoes on and doing the moves, and that was kind of funny,” said Sean, now a 12-year-old sixth grader.

Today, eight schools in the Parkway School District, based in Chesterfield, have their own D.D.R. systems, and three other game systems circulate among various schools in the district, said Ron Ramspott, the district coordinator of health and physical education.

“Our teachers are really buying into D.D.R. as a way to promote both physical health and learning,” he said. “When you’re playing the game you really have to process the information and then also do the moves physically, so we think it can help with brain development as well.”

As Leighton Nakamoto, a physical education teacher at Kalama Intermediate School in Makawao, Hawaii, put it: “The new physical education is moving away from competitive team sports and is more about encouraging lifetime fitness, and D.D.R. is a part of that. They can do it on their own, and they don’t have to compete with anyone else.”

Mr. Nakamoto said that he had used the game in class for four years and that his school had also installed the game in its “Active Lifestyle” room, where students are allowed and encouraged to play in their free time.

Dave Randall, the educational specialist for coordinated school health for the Hawaii Department of Education, said Hawaii was trying to put together a program like West Virginia’s to get the game into all of the state’s 265 public schools over the next three years.

Back in West Virginia, Anna Potter, 12, and Mikayla Leombruno, 13, were not concerned about all of the academic theories as they shimmied and bounced to the beat in Mr. Hines’s gym class.

“I like that you get to listen to music and you don’t have to be on a team or go anywhere special to play,” Anna said after their song. “If you do baseball or basketball, people get really competitive about it.”

Mikayla chimed in, “And you don’t have to be good at it to get a good workout.”

PC Dance game-A quick and fun way to keep fit

2009-01-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Pasar Tani which is nearby from my housing area in Bangi, and noticed a group of Mak Ciks were dancing with their eyes following closely a lady which happened to be their trainer. There was a loud music on the background, and I still remember the lyrics. “I love to move it..move it.” I don’t know what the song’s title is but for sure it comes from the famous Madagascar movie. Wow, I said, not that I was carried away by their curvy figure (remember I was only watching a group of makciks) but amazed of their spirit of keeping their body fit. It was only 7.30 and this group of mak cik were so motivated pumping up their muscle. Well done, I think this is the spirit that we youngsters should take as an example.

I feel living in this so-called highly sophisticated time, has left us little time to look after our own body. Haven’t we heard there are so many cases about young people caught in heart disease, small children having diabetes etc and so many other illnesses that were once alien to our ear in the old days. Well I am not talking about the illnesses that lie in the genetic, but more to the one that we acquire from our lifestyles. Well if we look at our lifestyles nowadays, this is not a surprise at all. We leave our home for work early in the morning, get caught in the traffic jam, receive pressure from the workplace, go back home and again caught in traffic jam, and reach home at night feeling tired. This routine was repeated over and over again without considering one of the most important things to our body—working out! How many of you allocate at least 20 minutes a day, 3 times a week as our Kementrian kesihatan keeps reminding us to do. I am not sure whether this is enough, but no harm to start small. I bet many of you would say no. The excuse? Keep it to yourself because I already knew it. We always complain we have no time, but how about time spend in watching EPL, surfing, tea tariking (having teh tarik with friends) facebooking, etc.

I think the real problem that we are having is not that we don’t have enough time, but the word “exercise” is registered as a boring stuff in our brain. Remember what Anthony Robins says, we human always do things based on two factors: getting pleasure or avoiding pain. In this case exercise to us is something that unpleasant and tedious to do. Why? Maybe because we attach so many negative things to it. To do exercise, I have to wear sport shoes, go out from my house, find parking at the park, find partner, spend money on trainer, shoes, you name it and you got it all. That is why you need to choose one exercise that is both easy and fun to do.

Don’t be hangat-hangat tahi ayam too, where we want to do this and that, but only for short period of time. I know this is our worst enemy in life where we are easily get excited, and easily get faded away too. Exercise is a continuous thing and should be part of our lifestyles, just like the teh tarik we have in the morning.

For me, DDR (or PC Dance Game) offers alternative to the conventional boring exercise routines. Not only it is cheap, you only need to purchase PC Dance Mat (no monthly commitment like in aerobic class), but it is also addictive (a trait that most exercises don’t possess). Have you experienced playing computer games and glued to it for several hours? Imagine what it can do to your body if same amount of time is spend on the Dance Game.

Tip for choosing song in Dance Game

2009-01-22T08:49:00.000-08:00

There is a spider web (see the bottom left portion of the pictures below) in Stepmania, which shows the difficulty level of each song. So for a beginner, please avoid any song that has a spider web like this (difficult to follow):

Instead, you should try songs that have spider webs like this (easier to follow):

How to turn off the moving background in Stepmania

2009-01-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

For those of you who find that the moving background is annoying, you can actually choose to turn it off by changing some settings in the Stepmania. If you are not sure what am I talking about, actually I am referring to the objects (like fish, cars, pigs etc) that fly around in the Stepmania screen while the song is played. Just follow the graphical instruction below.

In main Stepmania menu, go to Options

Then, select on Background Options

Finally, under Mode, choose OFF

How to play dance game

2009-01-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Nampaknya video ini sudah cukup untuk menerangkan bagaimana untuk menari di atas dance mat.

Menari ikut rentak, bukan main hentam aja!

2009-01-20T22:29:00.000-08:00

Teringat saya cerita lama Nasib Do Re Mi, adegan di mana Tompel menghentak satu alat muzik (rupa macam tamborine), Ibrahim Din sedang meniup bangsi (harmonika), manakala P.Ramlee memetik gitar selepas selesai melantak nasi disebuah rumah usang yang mereka terjumpa di hutan. Setelah beberapa ketika, P. Ramlee memarahi Tompel disebabkan memainkan alat muzik tidak mengikut rentak gitarnya. Dialognya yang saya masih ingat „Kalau nak ikut main, mestila kena dengan temponya” . Rupa-rupanya bunyi yang mereka dengar tu bukan dari alat muzik si Tompel, tapi hentakan kaki si gergasi yang sedang mahu pulang ke rumah usangnya tuh.
Jadi, sama la jugak semasa kita menari atas Dance Mat, semua nya berkisar tentang rentak atau tempo. Markah Stepmania yang kita akan dapat bergantung kepada sebaik mana kita dapat mengikuti rentak (beat) lagu yang kita sedang ikut..Cuma bayangkan anda sedang mendengar lagu kegemaran, sudah pasti kaki anda terikut-ikut dengan beat drum lagu tersebut. Jadi pindahkan saja pergerakan kaki tersebut ke atas dance mat dan pasti anda akan kagum dengan markah yang akan diperolehi nanti.

Tikar menari computer peribadi (PC Dance Mat)?

2009-01-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

Semasa memandu tadi, saya berkira2 apa nama yang nak diberi kepada PC dance Mat jika hendak diterjemah kepada bahasa melayu. Timbul idea untuk menamakannya Tikar Menari Komputer Peribadi. Kelakar bunyinya. Bagaimana dengan Tikar Joget atau Tikar Gelek?mmm.lebih kurang sama jugak..mungkin kena beri sedikit masa kepada telinga untuk membiasakan diri mendengarnya..Macam jugak istilah computer riba, tetikus, kayu ria, paparan dan berbagai lagi masa belajar dahulu, sekarang saya rasa dah semakin kurang darjah kejanggalan mendengarnya.

The most common mistakes made by newbies

2009-01-20T03:11:00.000-08:00

Have you watched the video about the 5 year old boy who danced superbly in my last post? What can you notice about the way he moved his feet? Yes, that’s right! He didn’t lift his feet after stepping on the arrow. Any way why would you want to do that? The reason given by newbie (like myself in my amateurish period) was we are afraid it would cause the Stepmania to detect our step. Actually it doesn’t. So don’t hesitate to just rest your feet on the last arrow it steps. By doing this not only will you save your time for the next incoming arrow, but also you can avoid doing unnecessary steps.

The other mistake that newbies like to commit is stepping on the dance mat too hard, or rather stomping like Maori people while performing their rituals :-). Actually it’s not necessary to do this as it is enough to just give a light pressure to the dance mat. The right way to step doesn’t even have sounds. By avoiding this not only you can avoid tiredness to your knee (or any other joints) and perhaps even saving you from injury (maybe? Because of the pressure given to them).

Try applying these tips and I am sure you will get more marvelous scores! Good luck!

Inspiring Dance steps from a 5 year old boy

2009-01-20T03:02:00.000-08:00

PC Dance game

2009-01-18T02:22:00.000-08:00

You might have heard of DDR, which stands for Dance Dance Revolution. But the one that I will discuss here is about PC Dance Dance Revolution which uses Stepmania program to run. The good news about this program is that it is absolutely free, and the only thing you need to buy is its dance mat. Make sure you buy the one that is specifically for PC, which connects to USB port.

You can buy PC Dance Mat from this link http://www.dance-mat.com.my/