How feasible is it to get kids programming Microsoft Kinect? [closed]

Question

I was reading through the answers for "How to get kids into programming" and Microsoft Kinect was conspicuous by its absence. However the "Kinect for Windows" homepage does talk about using it to educate students.

Presumably the APIs are still evolving and relatively complex - but how feasible would it be to get a younger audience (say 10-15) working with the technology? I ask because I think the physical feedback loop from the sensor would be a great Mindstorms-like experience for kids programming.

Are there any books, software "training wheels" or online resources about getting kids working with Kinect yet?

Answer 1

Working with the actual Kinect APIs requires some deep math & computer science understanding. The API provides you with 1) byte[]'s representing the various images that the sensors capture and 2) a series of {x,y,z} points representing various joints it is tracking on users' bodies.

Doing anything useful with those requires either trigonometry & linear physics (analyzing relationships between "joints" and how those change over time to perform a gesture) or working with the image byte[]s.

The skeleton stuff could be appropriate for advanced students at the high end of your age range.

It's probably more interesting to create an abstraction layer around the Kinect SDK which does "the hard parts" and exposes a more "fun" API that is geared towards giving kids reasons to explore more basic CS concepts.

Answer 2

Also, I have done other programming camps with people my age that don't get WeScheme, so I would do a camp like that to find out who ACTUALLY understands how computers work and who would be dedicated to find out. Most of the people that signed up don't actually enjoy programming since it was hard for them to start at 12, or an early age. And I left out in my first comment that I am 3-4 years ahead of everyone else in math, making it much easier for me. So I would say start at 15, weed out the non-dedicated, then start basics of the language you are going to use, then you can jump into Kinect. Hope this helps!