Using the Kinect sensor with open source tools for the development of educational games for kids in pre-school age

The Kinect sensor is a device that can recognize the user´s hands and body movements without controllers or marks. Although Kinect was originally designed for the Xbox 360 game console, programming tools for PC appeared shortly after its release. As a result, many papers and applications explore Kinect´s technology nowadays, in areas such as robotics and medicine. Kinect can be specially useful for pre-school education, since the human-computer interaction with hand movements supports the concept of hand-eye coordination, an ability to be developed during the pre-school age. This work presents a prototype that uses Kinect and includes educational games for pre-schoolers. This prototype was tested in an educational center for pre-school children, and was evaluated positively. From this experience we concluded that these kind of tools has a high potential in the educational field, whereas there is a need of interaction standards to aid the development of such kind of applications.