Something I didn’t know existed, the Microsoft Office World Championship

Something I didn’t know existed, the Microsoft Office World Championship

On a Sunday night two weeks back, in the Rose Court Garden of the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, 150 antsy competitors between the ages of 13 and 22 milled around eating miniature whoopie pies by the light of the Moon, sizing up their global rivals in the efficient use of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word….

These students are streaming their videogame playing to pay for college

These students are streaming their videogame playing to pay for college

As she neared 24 straight hours of playing Dead Space, Kaitlyn Richelle watched in shock as a $250 donation flashed across her screen. “That’s the goal,” she shouted. “That’s the tuition.” She paused her Twitch stream, struggling to get a full sentence out. She had just raised $5,000 to help pay for medical school. Source: Meet the streamers using…

A list of the 5 best STEM toys for preschoolers

A list of the 5 best STEM toys for preschoolers

Our list of the best STEM toys for preschoolers 2017 is carefully structured to include toys which provide a rounded curriculum for your child. From learning to code, to engineering basics, to learning about scientific equipment, we’ve got it covered! Source: Top 5 Best STEM Toys for Preschoolers 2017 | Coding & Engineering I’ve listed the…

Barbed wire fence was the telecommunications medium of choice for farmers

Barbed wire fence was the telecommunications medium of choice for farmers

It was in building the network connecting homestead to homestead that the farmers’ ingenuity came to the fore. Instead of erecting new poles and wires, many either ran phone wires along the top of wooden fence posts or used the barbed wire itself to carry signals. The latter hardly worked as well as insulated copper…

Teaching by machine learning

Teaching by machine learning

Certainly teaching in a school where everything is recorded and deposited into a computer is pretty creepy. But is “hyper-personalized” instruction, driven by massive amounts of data and delivered by screen, really the future of learning? Or is it just the future for kids whose districts have the money to buy into this kind of…

Focusing on mistakes

Focusing on mistakes

Once a month, this column will examine the insights that science offers about the way people learn, and how such findings could influence schools. Most of us can remember a moment like this from our school years: the teacher poses a question – maybe it’s math, maybe history.  You raise your hand, you give your…

Artificial intelligence in education

Artificial intelligence in education

To explore what machine learning could mean in education, EdSurge convened a meetup this past week in San Francisco with Adam Blum (CEO of OpenEd), Armen Pischdotchian, (an academic technology mentor at IBM Watson), Kathy Benemann (CEO of EruditeAI), and Kirill Kireyev (founder of instaGrok and technology head at TextGenome and GYANT). EdSurge’s Tony Wan moderated the session. Source: Real Questions About…