The Potential of Kinect in Education

—This paper explores the potential of Kinect as interactive technology and discusses how it can facilitate and enhance teaching and learning. Kinect is examined in terms of its affordances of technical interactivity, which is an important aspect of pedagogical interactivity. As it utilizes gesture-based technology, Kinect can support kinesthetic pedagogical practices to benefit learners with strong bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Though it has facilities to fabricate meaningful classroom interactions, Kinect technology can not stand alone in the classroom setting but needs to be integrated with a computer, projector and compatible software. As far as a teaching tool is concerned, due to the multiple interaction types it supports, Kinect has the potential to enhance classroom interactions, to increase classroom participation, to improve teachers' ability to present and manipulate multimedia and multimodal materials, and to create opportunities for interaction and discussion. As a learning tool, Kinect has the affordances to create enjoyable, interesting interactions types, to boost student motivation, and to promote learning via its multimedia and multi-sensory capacity. In addition, students can utilize the bodily information gathered by Kinect with software programs to create highly interactive multimedia works. However, the implementation of Kinect in the classroom has technical constraints such as large classroom space, lack of easy-to-use development tools, and long calibration time and pedagogical constraints such as the difficulties in shifting to kinesthetic pedagogical practices and limited understanding of its effect.