Dance lesson at Cleveland Junior School using Xbox Kinect and Dance Central

Its that time of year again when its far to cold and snowy to go out and have a PE lesson. Here at Cleveland Junior we took our lesson indoors and started to use the Xbox Kinect in order to have a dance lesson with a difference.

We had the children warm up as normal and then put them into 2 - 3 lines. We were playing Dance Central which allows the player to dance in front of the Kinect sensor without any controllers or peripherals and it can pick up the players movements and score them on how well they match the dancer on screen.

There is a huge list of songs to chose from and are all very recent and well known by staff and children. We started off with Lady Gaga and Poker Face, we went through the break down section which taught us all the moves and then we performed the entire song on easy mode as a class.

Once the children had got an idea of what they were doing we went through 3 other songs and had a different child step to the front and lead the rest of the class. The Kinect only picks up one player and scores one player but the other 30 children behind were all getting in the mood and dancing along as well. The children all got a good workout and were taught some new dance moves. There is lots of room for progression and we had some children who picked up on the dances very quickly. There are around 30 dances and all have a easy,medium and hard difficulty setting.

There are some images and (blurry & low res) videos below of the lesson in action. Hopefully more to come in the next few weeks.


Simon and Anjum
Cleveland Junior

Click to Play

ClevelandJ and Kinect ;

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Clevelandj and kinect

Blog passes 100,000 hits

I've had google analytics running on this blog since quite early on. It provided considerable encouragement and I still, if a little vaguely, remember the first time it passed 1000 hits in a single month - I was amazed. These days it averages over 3,500 a month; it once touched 7000.

Recently, I've been watching it creep up to the 100,000 total hits count. This morning it heaved itself over. I thought you might like to see the breakdown.

Total hits: 100,039
Page views: 297,070
Average time on site: 00:01:59
New visits: 39.32%

Referring sites: 70.29%
Direct traffic: 23.22%
Search engines: 6.22%
Other traffic: 0.27%

Countries: 123
Top 20 countries (in high to low order): UK, USA, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Czech Republic, Denmark, Japan, Greece, Finland.
Obscurer countries: Azerbaijan and the Dutch Antilles make a good showing with 3 hits each, whilst it seems only one gamer in Mongolia has had broadband in his yurt.

Thanks to everyone who has visited this blog since 28th April 2008.

Best Regards to you all,

James Roach