This lively video by Stephen Howell in the Dublin Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference tells us all about how he developed a toolkit ‘Kinect2Scratch‘ that teaches kids programming by using Scratch and the Kinect.
From IxDA: “This talk will show how anybody, especially kids and non-programmers, can design and develop games and interactive media applications for the Microsoft Kinect controller. Focusing on making programming interesting by teaching Kinect game creation with the Scratch language, this talk should be of interest to educators, non-programmers and the those who need an excuse to jump around in the name of education and art.
Stephen is a computer science lecturer with the Institute of Technology Tallaght, where he lectures on Software Development and Interactive Media Design & Development. He focuses on creative coding and interactive art using technologies such as Processing, openFrameworks, Cinder and OpenGL.
Stephen is the author of Kinect2Scratch, a bridge from the revolutionary Microsoft depth-camera to Scratch, a widely-used toolkit for teaching programming to kids. When he is not lecturing, Stephen consults with industry on how to build the next generation of natural user interfaces for marketing, content production and e-learning systems. For fun, he likes to hack together games, digital art and educational materials using C++, C#, Processing, Scratch, Lego and Kodu with his four kids.”
Check out Stephen’s latest work – Leap2Scratch interface: