Kinect in Education! (kinectEDucation)

Although I'm currently exploring the world of interactive HTML5, interactive video, etc., I think I just might make "kinecteducation" the focus of my tech-hobbies. I have some experience with game programming-one of my computer courses required a project using XNA- and I know quite a bit about gesture and multitouch, multi-user interactio, so it would'nt be too much of a stretch.


My motivation?

As a school psychologist, my main assignment is a school/program for students with disabilities, including about 40 or so who have autism spectrum disorders. Yesterday, the principal of the school attended a demonstration of the Kinect and requested that our school be considered for piloting it. One of my other assignments is a magnet high school for technology and the arts, and rumor has it that it will be offering a game programming curriculum.  I'd love to co-sponsor an after-school game club and encourage the students to program educational apps for the Kinect sometime in the near future! 


I'm also working as a client, in collaboration with come of my educator colleagues, with a team of university students who are creating a communication/social skills game suite geared for students with autism and related disabilities....


I'm inspired by the possibilities!


We have large SMARTboards in each classroom and in other locations around the building, and we have a Wii set up in the large therapy room adjacent to my office. The Wii has proven to be very useful in helping the students develop social and leisure skills that they can use in and outside of the school settings, but some of the students have difficulty manipulating the buttons on the controllers.


You can get Kinect-based apps from the Kinect Education website! Below are selected links from the website:

• 9 Excellent Programming Resources for Kinect
• Kinect Lesson Plans
• KinectEDucation Blog
• Teacher's Guide to Kinect and Gesture-Based Learning

You can also get additional information from the Microsoft in Education "Kinect in the Classroom" website.

Below are a few videos to give you an overview of how open-source applications designed for the Kinect can be used in education: 

Revisiting Good Blogs - Web of Things: "Architecting the Web of Things for Tinkerers and Hackers"

One of my interests is pervasive computing, which casts a very wide "web".  That's why I like the Web of Things blog.  Below is an excerpt from the "About" section of the blog:

"Why do you want to change the Internet? What’s wrong with it? 
Not much really. It’s just a little boring. It only contains data published by other humans, but it’s not enough linked with our physical reality, not real time / real world enough for our taste! 


Why should I read this blog? 
Well depends how much you care about technology. It’s both for geeks/hackers who need a playground to develop and try ideas. But it’s also for the security expert who wants to take part to make the Web a safer place to hang out. It’s also for people who want to find new ideas." 


More about the Web of Things: 
"The Web of Things is a community of developers, researchers, and designers that explore the future of the physical Web. We explore how to leverage Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices (sensors, mobile phones, etc.) in order to make them easier to use and to integrate in classic Web applications. We aim to build a future Web of devices that is truly open, flexible, and scalable, and we believe Web standards are the best way to do it." 


The Web of Things blog was founded by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa, two "researchers/geeks" working at ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich.

Designing for Multitouch Tables and Surfaces, by Erin Rose, Open Exhibits Blog

If you are interested in exploring collaborative tabletop applications, take a look at the Open Exhibits blog. Erin Rose's recent post, "Designing for Multi-touch Tables and Surfaces", is a good overview of lessons learned over the past couple of years in design, development, and implementation of multi-user interactive tabletop applications.

Although the focus of Open Exhibits is on applications and systems designed for museum exhibits, many of the design challenges hold true for similar applications in other settings, such as classrooms, libraries, and other public spaces.

Erin's post explores each of the following topics in more detail:

• Don't forget that the table is omni-directional.
• Individual control of objects encourages multi-user interaction.
• Promote collaboration, founded in healthy competition.

(Erin Rose is a developer and community liaison for Open Exhibits.)

RELATED
Exhibit Files
Jim Spadaccini
Visitors Explore L.A. in Google Maps and Flickr Mashup.

Michael Ogawa, Data Visualization Researcher, VIDI (UC Davis)

I followed a link today to Michael Ogawa's website and blog. He's a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at the University of California at Davis, where he participates in research with the VIDI (Visualization and Interface Design Innovation) group.

Here is a description of Michael's research, quoted from his site:

"My research focus is in software visualization. I am interested in bringing to light the efforts of software developers: How they work together on projects effectively to create some of the largest and most complex systems in the world. Complementary to that goal, I am also interested in designing visually appealing applications that capture an emotional aspect not seen in charts and graphs." -Michael Ogawa
I haven't fully explored Owaga's website, but it looks interesting.  Here is a video I found on his site of T.S. Elliot reading the "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".  The visualization of the poem is interpreted by Open Wordle, an open source library for Processing, available at  http://code.google.com/p/openwordle/



RELATED
Owaga is known for his work on the Code_Swarm project, "an experiment in organic software visualization". Below is a visualization of the commit history of the Eclipse IDE project:

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
(Music: "Orange" by Etherfysh)
Open source code for Codeswarm: http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm
Kwan-Lui Ma, iMichael Ogawa's advisor

News and Publication Links from the VIDI website:

• VIDi paper "An Exploratory Technique for Coherent Visualization of Time-Varying Volume Data" has been accepted to EuroVis 2010
• Wei-Hsien Hsu, Jianqiang Mei, Carlos Correa, and Kwan-Liu Ma received a best paper award at ArtsIT 2009.
• VIDI papers accepted to this year's IEEE Vis, InfoVis and VAST conferences.