UPDATED 15:11 EDT / DECEMBER 22 2011

NEWS

Microsoft Brings “Edutainment” to the Next Level with Sesame Street, Kinect Partnership

No doubt, Xbox has been changing the way that we view television by bringing Internet TV into the living room; but there’s still more avenues for Microsoft to tap with the universally plastic interactivity of the Kinect. The television show, Sesame Street has been an educator and entertainment option directed at children for decades now and they’re the perfect venue to wed human interaction and television video game content.

Today, Reuters is reporting on the partnership between the educational entertainment studio and Microsoft for Xbox LIVE and Kinect.

In a novel approach, Sesame Street characters will appear on screen in the normal fashion of programming but ask children watching to interact with them and become part of their own education and entertainment. This is already a type of programming glibly called “edutainment,” this could dramatically change how parents and educators view both television programming and the video game experience.

“Children participate while watching television but they can’t interact because their actions have no impact on show programming. It continues to go on,” says Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop, Research and Education VP. “With Kinect Sesame Street TV it’s a totally different experience because if you’re not going to interact, the character is going to prompt you to interact so there are going to be two tracks where the child will truly be interacting and getting feedback. So if they’re asked to identify the letter D and they pick the letter e they will be corrected.”

In our culture, children already spend hours a day watching television.

So-called the “boob tube” by an older generation due to its mesmerizing effect and how non-interactive it is, this has been a long-standing criticism for the type of content that television delivers. Even educatainment programs such as Sesame Street have never been able to escape from the one-sided delivery that television provides; but the digital revolution, DVRs, and especially Internet TV has been changing all that.

Time for video games and natural human interaction devices to enter center stage and Kinect is an excellent product for doing exactly that.

Unlike the Wiimote or the PlayStation Move, the Kinect does not require the child to remember where the interactive object is in the room. All they have to do is activate the programming and go. Furthermore, with prompting from characters on the screen, they’ll be able to interact with them in a similar fashion as they would with another person.

Microsoft and Sesame Street are dubbing this a project about “playful learning.”

No doubt, it will help shape the future of how the Xbox, Internet TV, and Kinect will affect the lives of a new generation.


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