Kinect offers creative expressions in classrooms

The Kinect is not only meant to offer gamers a different method of playing instead of just twiddling their thumbs and mashing buttons with their fingers on a standard video game controller. No sir, with a little bit of creative thinking, Kinect will even make learning in the classroom a whole lot less dreary. For example, first-grade teacher Cheryl Arnett, just 19 years of age, who teaches at the Sunset Elementary School in Craig, Colorado, used the Kinect to study subjects like animals, geography, and science, and the kind of improvements she has seen in her students have encouraged her that she is on the right track. After all, the results are telling – her students experienced improvements in their comprehension in addition to the retention of what they have learned. Other teachers elsewhere, too, have benefited from the Kinect’s presence in the classroom.

For example, computer science students Jebediah Pavleas and Jack Chang, teamed up with professor Robin Angotti in order to program a custom Kinect app which enables students to graph functions such as distance, acceleration and velocity – not using pencil and paper, but rather, ‘play’ with their bodies instead. Sounds like a neat excuse for not bringing your stationery to class, no?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Kinect, Microsoft