Using the Kinect sensor with open source tools for the development of educational games for kids in pre-school age

Abstract

The Kinect sensor is a device that can recognize the user's hands and body movements without controllers or marks. Although Kinect was originally designed for the Xbox 360 game console, programming tools for PC appeared shortly after its release. As a result, many papers and applications explore Kinect's technology nowadays, in areas such as robotics and medicine. Kinect can be specially useful for pre-school education, since the human-computer interaction with hand movements supports the concept of hand-eye coordination, an ability to be developed during the pre-school age. This work presents a prototype that uses Kinect and includes educational games for pre-schoolers. This prototype was tested in an educational center for pre-school children, and was evaluated positively. From this experience we concluded that these kind of tools has a high potential in the educational field, whereas there is a need of interaction standards to aid the development of such kind of applications.