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.

The purpose of this study was to identify salient features for a critical thinking app and create an instrument to facilitate the app evaluation and selection process. Two questions guided the study: (1) What distinguishes critical thinking instructional apps from others? and (2) What design principles are essential to develop a critical thinking instructional app? The study was conducted in two phases, including a synthesis of existing research in Phase I and development of an evaluation instrument in Phase II. Three lines of research (on critical thinking, educational apps design principles, and tools for the evaluation of educational apps) informed the development of the instrument, which included three evaluation categories (content, pedagogy, and design). A synthesis of research used to create the instrument is included herein along with the instrument design process, rationale for this design, recommendations for usage, its limitations, and implications for future practice and research. Findings will enable app users to more wisely select critical thinking apps specific to their needs and assist app developers with distinguishing the salient qualities required to design apps for critical thinking. The study accordingly contributes to both software evaluation and its development with findings beneficial to both app users and developers.

Abstract-A visual programming environment, Scratch, is widely used by young students, and is reported to improve the participation of females in the field of computer science. The purpose of this study is to investigate gender differences among elementary school students' game design preferences. The participants in this study are eight 2nd graders, four boys and four girls, with few programming experiences. The experimental sessions are conducted for 8 weeks with one instructor facilitating students' game design. Each session lasts for two hours. As they are limited in their knowledge of programming, the participants are given model examples to work with. Gender differences in game design preferences are measured by examining student works. The results indicate that (1) girls are more interested in drawing, while boys are more interested in designing game interactions, (2) when it comes to character selection, girls are fond of drawing realistic characters while boys like to use Scratch built-in characters, (3) both boys and girls are interested in taking the challenges of the model examples, and (4) girls are more motivated to incorporate multimedia into their projects.

The purpose of this project is to understand elementary school students' preferences in interactive game design. By examining the processes of elementary school students using Scratch to design and create games, this study intends to investigate gender differences in terms of computer literacy, multimedia application, codes and game design preferences in order to understand the factors influencing students' achievement and motivation in computer science. This study was carried out in the setting of a Scratch contest. In total, 46 contest participants were recruited. Questionnaires on programming concepts derived from computing thinking and analysis of student works were utilized as the major research method. The research results indicate that (1) girls had significantly better knowledge of counting loops than boys; (2) boys used significantly more built-in costumes than girls; (3) boys used more diverse sensing blocks than girls; (4) boys incorporated more game design mechanisms than girls; (5) girls were likely to incorporate positive feedback, while boys were likely to incorporate negative feedback and both positive and negative feedback.

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