Education and movement with Kinect

The learning process should be a funny process, and to achieve this,movement is fundamental to keep kids physically active and interested through the learning process. 

Here is where Kinect appears as one of the best gadget to accomplish this. Developing educational games controlled with kids body ensure: 

1. Long term knowledge 
2. Physical activity 
3. Active participation from kids within learning process 
4. FUN !!!!!! 

Let's use the technology we have to get a better world 

Cheers 

Tech and education

Technology and education

Do you think technology must or at least should support the learning process?

My answer is, without any question, a big YES.  Involving more than one sense helps the student to get a better quality knowledge.

The best example is the bicycle example: You have to learn how to ride a bike with practice, there is no other way, riding a bike cannot be learned teorically, you need to experiment.   This means that for learning how to ride a bike, you have to involve more than one sense and experiment.  This will create a long term knowledge.  Once you learn how to ride a bike, you'll never forget how to do it.

Same happend with the learning process, if the student involve more than one sense, the generated knowledge will be a long term knowledge.

Today, technology make easy to encourages students to involve more than one sense, thats why, technology must be included as a learning tool.

Cheers!!!

Educational oportunity

Quality education may save our society

Without any question, at least, from my perspective, the education, if it doesn't have enough quality, is the reason for all society problems.

You can mention any problem: insecurity, poverty, violence, depression, you name it, the root cause of all this problems is education.  Be able to bring eduation to all kids, should be one of the main objective of our goverments.  An educated people will reduce or even dissapear most of the problems of our society.

It is also important to remember, it is not the same quantity than quality, and we as software/games developers, have the responsability of helping our society to get a high quality learning process.  Nowadays we have the technology and the tools to change the way our children are learning.

Lets do some code for quality education.

Cheers!!!

Design, design, and then ... design

Today, I confirmed what all programming books mention.   Design is key within programming process.   Of course I know this, with +12 year of experience as a developer, I really know, but sometimes we tend to forget this important phase.

Creating a game, is not different of application creation, you need to design first, this will save you a lot of work and improve development performance.

Thats way it is important to remember, at the beginning, paper and pen, is better than laptop and mouse.

Cheers !!

Kinect in education

Is Kinect the new tool to provide a high quality education?  as every thing in life, it depends on the perspective and the quality of products created with Kinect.

Let me start with an example.   If you create the best educational software, no matter how good is it, if nobody plays with it, it is useful.  In the other hand, if you create a crap education software, with a great distribution, a lot of people will be playing it, but sooner or later no one will use it.  Thats why it is important not only to have a great distribution or visibility, it is also important to have a high impact, high quality educational software, a great educational software/game cannot live without any of the 2 characteristics mentioned above.

Now, lets talk about kinect.   Is this device the new solution for education software? I think, kinect is the best tool we had have in years, this tiny device allow us (developers) to create amazing software, with not only quality content, also with activity and great interactions.

When a child uses his whole body to interact with an educational software, everything becomes easy, learn is now an interactive activity that eliminates the pasive role of student, now the student is part of the learning process.

Now, Im working in our first education sofware that use Kinect as a main interface between students and content.  Soon I will be sharing with you, the first demo.

Cheers.