“I would mainly say it’s not about learning.” “We think we are an art school.” “Knowledge is un-useful, dangerous, and removes your freedom.” All of this must be put in the context of programming, and how information technology has changed. École 42 is not about learning because learning has traditionally been about mastering a body…
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism…
Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile. “Let’s see,” he said one morning this spring. “I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical…
In order to do that, they help kids develop an interest in science and technology at an early age. This is where Google Play comes in—we’re putting together a new collection of 13 books on Google play that will get kids excited about coding. We’re releasing the first two books today: Girls Who Code: Learn to…
If we think about how this plays out now, a young lawyer who wants to know how similar cases were handled and see what research had been done could, if they were working in a large firm, simply walk down the hall and ask another lawyer who had that knowledge. In fact, that is what…
On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write. Judith C. Hochman, founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of student work. A first grader had produced the following…
A challenge we faced while building SpriteBox Coding, a learn to code game for kids ages 5+, was that the educational component primarily centred around puzzles. However, as we learned with our previous title LightBot, for some kids, puzzles simply aren’t exciting on their own. There were often players who needed a reason for why…
Formative assessment: you’ve heard about it, you’ve read the research, and you’ve probably tried it out in your classroom. Whether you’re a formative assessment newbie or a veteran, these techniques can help spice up how you check for understanding in the classroom. They range from the classics, like exit slips, to ideas you may have never…
In a nondescript Apple office building in Cupertino, California, a group of engineers has spent the past four weeks working feverishly on the next big thing in consumer hardware, prototyping a water-saving shower head, a new version of the Apple Watch, and a “smart” water bottle. These products may never hit the market, but that…
Rather than filling garages with flashy cars, the data show, today’s rich devote their budgets to less visible but more valuable ends. Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other…