Last week I bought a Kinect for the science faculty and embedded it into a Year 7 science class. If you search for Kinect in the classroom in Google, you’d find a large number of teachers already using Kinect in the classroom. However, most of them have integrated the Kinect in complex ways that require hacking the Kinect or SDK coding. I wanted to embed the Kinect as part of a learning activity that all teachers can implement in the classroom without feeling intimidated by.

My Year 7 class is doing a unit of work on forces at the moment. In the unit of work, they do an activity to measure average speed of moving objects. Traditionally I would bring students outside the classroom to run and walk a certain distance and measure the time taken to calculate average speed. I have also used slot cars in similar ways. Now that I’ve got the Kinect, I wanted to device an activity that allowed students to do a fun activity that won’t usually be possible in the classroom.

I decided to get my Year 7s to do hurdles in Kinect Sports. In pairs, students ran a 100 m race in hurdles and Kinect Sports measured their time. Students then calculated the average speed of each student and constructed a table to show the results.

My Year 7s usually need a lot of support in learning activities. With Kinect Sports, I had a student volunteer familiar with Kinect to demonstrate the game and all students knew what to do without my help at all. They were also highly engaged and were very motivated to calculate average speeds for each student to find out who is the fastest. The students completed the speed calculations faster than I expected. In a one hour period, this is what the class achieved the following:

-Completed a quick quiz

-Brainstormed why distance, time and speed were important measurements in an object’s movement due to forces

-Students constructed a table to record the results from Kinect Sports

-Each student ran 100 m hurdles in Kinect Sports

-Average speed calculations were completed by students

-Furniture was rearranged to its original seating plan

-Lesson was summarised

It might not sound much, but this was a great achievement from this class!

While this activity may not be the most creative or complex way to integrate Kinect as a teaching and learning tool, it is an activity that can ease many teachers in integrating gaming consoles into the classroom It is a numeracy-based activity that has applications in many other subject areas. This activity was shared with other teachers at my school in our weekly Xbox professional learning sessions.