Players seek risks, challenges, rewards, and recognition when they play a game. Application of various game mechanics to learning experiences can help fulfill these ‘human motivations’. When you design a learning game, you need to choose mechanics that seem appealing for your students, whilst also ensuring that they gel well with the context and the…
The Nautilus is a research vehicle operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, a nonprofit founded by Robert Ballard, one of the people who helped us find the Titanic. It conducts scientific research and offers live video and audio streams to those of us who are unable to come along. This year, it’ll journey along the…
Hours after a mob of villagers beat five strangers to death over a rumor on WhatsApp, nobody wanted to clean up the blood: There was just too much of it. … Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads…
What Islamic Golden Age Thinkers Discovered Long before the West Sure you’ve heard of Copernicus, Fibonacci and Fermat. But what about Ibn al-haytham, al-Bīrūni, al-razi – the often uncredited Islamic Golden Age scholars who inspired and informed their discoveries? Our interactive infographic charts the discoveries, inventions and scientific breakthroughs of the Islamic Golden…
An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do multiplication and long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills, and writing code. Yet the challenges that our…
Even an internationally recognized futurist is no match for the inertia and entrenchment of the legal profession. That was my sense after the opening day keynote last week at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Futurist Lisa Bodell is founder and CEO of futurethink, which teaches companies to “become award-winning…
There’s no shortage of “nature soundtracks,” but how many of them are the actual sounds from a US National Park? To celebrate its 102nd birthday, the National Park Service is offering ParkTracks, a 12-minute mix of sounds from across various national parks. The sounds were captured by the NPS’s (wonderfully named) Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division,…
I doubt anyone would argue with the goals of making math class more joyful and playful, but those goals are more easily adapted to a poster or conference slidedeck than to the actual experience of math students and teachers. So what does a math class look like that responds whenever a student acts mathematically,…
According to a recent Pew survey, 59 percent of teens have been bullied online, and according to a 2017 survey conducted by Ditch the Label, a nonprofit anti-bullying group, more than one in five 12-to-20-year-olds experience bullying specifically on Instagram. “Instagram is a good place sometimes,” said Riley, a 14-year-old who, like most kids in…
For many middle– and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers. “Coming from somebody with severe anxiety,…