Primo Toys has created Cubetto, a wooden robot that can be programmed without a device, or the ability to read and write. Students program the robot with a series of commands on a wooden board, and the robot rolls over a special mat. It looks like a great way to teach coding concepts, which, in…
In The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, Tyler Cowen argues that more Americans are living comfortably and contently with what life has handed them. By sheltering ourselves from the new and different, it’s hard to see what is lost by standing still. But if you look at the data, we’re seeing…
When you think about a traditional school workflow, it’s not unlike that of a business: paper is generated and moved in a systematic way between the children and the teacher. Just as cloud computing has transformed workflows in business to make them more collaborative and mobile, that same type of change has been coming to…
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…
Turing Tumble is a new type of game where players (ages 8+) build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. It’s fun, addicting, easy-to-learn, and while you’re playing, you discover how computers work. I’m all about teaching kids to code. When I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I saw how valuable…
For example, robot journalists in the Associated Press wrote thousands of stories last year, mostly about listed companies’ earnings and sports news. The automated technology has proved to be highly accurate in reporting on standardized topics, and was extremely fast. A report on a listed firm’s results could be churned out in a second. AP’s…
