Kinect technology for education and developing research thinking

In recent years technology has changed many aspects of the way we think, learn and live. As far as education is concerned, the classroom has no longer walls and boundaries; the young learners live through the information era and are considered as digital natives. Powerful learning environments seem to be the key factor in education nowadays. Video games can provide us with new, more powerful ways for teaching in schools, communities, and work- places-new ways to learn within the new information age.

There are a lot of cognitive aspects that can be developed by good educational video games, such as vision, cognition, multitasking, processing speed, reaction, selective attention. One of the most important skills in the research thinking is system thinking and setting goals and aims. System thinking can be defined as considering all parts of a system, but also considering the system as a whole and interactions between the parts.

Taking into account the cognitive qualities and how video games affect them, we can define some principles that should be considered while designing a game. The first principle is called «Co-design» and it means that the actions of a user are important «Fish tank» says that a game should be started with easy and common things, and the complexity should be added step by step. The «Sandbox» principle says that a user should feel free and safe to try and practice. «Well-ordered problems» give learners the possibility not only to learn facts, but to learn to solve problems. The next principle to make problem-solving successful is the one that can be called «Pleasant frustration». It means that every problem a player faces with is not a stress, but a challenge. Another principle says that all the information given needs to be applied by a player. Information is effective for people when it is given either just in time or given on demand. The last principle is developing system thinking.

The Kinect technology is an innovative tool that can be used not only for fun, but also for learning and interaction among users. Kinect is a motion sensor, implemented by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. The device provides a natural user interface that allows users to interact without any intermediary device, it identifies individual players through face and voice recognition. The Kinect contains three vital pieces that work together to detect motion and create physical image on the screen: RGB color VGA video camera to give a flat colorful image, a depth sensor to give depth and capture a player in an environment and a multi-array microphone to capture and recognize the voice of a player, cutting the ambient noise off.

The Kinect has its application in gaming, robotics, science, art and education.

The aim of our work is to develop an educational game, based on the motion-capture technology for the PetrSU Science Museum. The unattainable objects like the stars, volcanoes, body cells would be presented in the virtual exposition of the Museum. The visitors would be able not only to watch them or get some information about their structure, but also to interact with these objects, learn by this interaction and try to build their own stars, volcanoes etc.

О. Э. Кулдавлетова