The last few months I have been busy with my final project about large scale curriculum design. In the frame of this project, I am going to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley to join the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading (SEEDS) team.
SEEDS is a large scale curriculum development initiative which aims to help children in the middle-primary grades develop the inquiry skills needed to make sense of the physical world while building fundamental literacy skills. Their products are highly praised, as is their design process. But their work is hardly known among the instructional design and design research communities. (see also: http://lawrencehallofscience.org/node/3107).
To share my time in Berkeley with you, I made a new blog which can be found here: http://maaikeh.blogspot.com/. I intend to post stories and photos every now and then :)
Remember I was talking about the Microsoft visit? And how we played on the Kinect? Very cool, of course, and the device is at the moment only made for playing games. What they (obviously) did not tell me at Microsoft is that people already made some other awesome programs for the Kinect!
Take for example this 3D drawing program, shown in the first video below. The Kinect is designed to track motions in three dimensions. Although a lot of games are not using this unique feature (yet), this project resulted in program that uses this feature in 3D drawing. With one single hand the user can ‘paint’ lines on a ‘3D canvas’ and with two hands the user can rotate the drawing in different angles. In the video just a few random lines are drawn, but I can imagine that an artist or an industrial designer, for example, could create some nice 3D images or ‘sculptures’. The second video shows a program that creates 3D virtual reality. Someone managed to create an illusion of 3D images using the Kinect. This program is designed to follow the place of the user’s head in space, based on which it adapts the image on the screen to the place of the head. This way the image looks to be 3D, sticking out of your television (without glasses!).
Though these are still relatively simple applications/examples, I think programs like this have great potential. I also can imagine programs like this used in education! Wouldn’t that be cool?? Of course artistic related subjects could use these features, but also imagine applying these features to a mathematical program to learn more about geometry, symmetry or even Pythagoras. Or the Body Bowser program I was talking about in my previous post, see what happens to the bones structure or the muscles, when people bend. Maybe in medical education, to make a simulation more realistic (e.g. operations, dentist procedures).
3D drawing program on the Kinect
3D virtual reality program created with the Kinect
