That’s a bold statement but it’s true – any kid even can write games for Kinect with Scratch. Scratch is a programming language for kids out of the MIT Media Labs. Steven Howell saw the potential of combining this with the Kinect and connected them together. Kids all over the world can now write natural user interface games with the Kinect.
This project is not for you to write XBox games at the moment but rather it works with the Microsoft Kinect SDK BETA 2. There are a lot of awesome projects that are using Kinect for the PC. I talked about the stuff that Von Bismark is doing the other day. I’ll dig into that more in an upcoming post.
I love this because it captures the imagination as to what’s possible if you can quickly and easily create a natural user interface by dragging and dropping code snippets.
Scratch and Kinect from Stephen Howell on Vimeo.
Full instructions on how to set it all up and get started writing games is on Steven’s site at http://scratch.saorog.com/.
For lots of information about the Scratch project:
Educators – Information for educators using Scratch
News – Stories about Scratch in the media
Research – Papers and presentations about Scratch
Donate – Support the Scratch project