Kids, and adults, can certainly learn stuff from watching videos of the type Green produces (and I have). But those topics exist in isolation. And connecting them into something actually useful is a far more difficult process. One that requires teachers.
Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world…
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…
Final-year high school students who sat a national history exam in New Zealand have launched a petition asking the exam be marked based on students’ own definition of an “unfamiliar” word. Source: NZ students start petition after exam word ‘trivial’ confused them I have no words… At least no words that these students would be able…
When I see a great light display, I rarely consider the effort and meticulous planning that goes into it. While I was going through my decorating process on Friday, I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to our classrooms. When great instruction is happening in our classrooms, we often don’t think of the effort…
Mattel Is Making a $300 3D Printing Toy Studio For Kids The ThingMaker 3D is an aggressively priced ($300) 3D printer that pairs with an app to allow kids to create a wide range of toys than span both jewelry and figurines. The companion app that operates the printer is actually a very sophisticated 3D…
There’s a lot of talk about digital media. Increasing screen time has created worries about media’s impacts on democracy, addiction, depression, relationships, learning, health, privacy and much more. The effects are frequently assumed to be huge, even apocalyptic. Scientific data, however, often fail to confirm what seems true based on everyday experiences. In study after study, screen time is often not correlated with important effects at a…