Video games at school?

To video gamers, the name Microsoft Kinect is synonymous with the Xbox 360 video game console. To University of Toronto graduate student Uzma Khan, the motion-sensing input device offered a myriad of other possibilities. Khan, a master's degree student in applied computing, used the course Topics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to explore the ways Kinect might be used in elementary school classrooms for gesture and speech recognition. The course focused on user experiences with next-generation input and output technologies. Students read and discussed papers from leading researchers around the world, and had the opportunity to apply their teachings to building their own interactive system using exciting new technologies. Khan decided to use the Microsoft Kinect as new hardware. Khan enjoyed developing some ways that the Kinect might be used for pedagogical purposes.