Group items tagged

"Many of us will have fond memories of children's TV engaging us to turn our used bottles into rockets, our wooden spoons into cartoon character puppets, and attaching googly eyes to anything which keeps still for more than 3 seconds! Schools are great at turning recycling into creativity, and design is at the heart of this. Later, the skills pupils learn turning pasta into planes and tins into trains fuel are the beginning of making the engineers and artisans of the future."

"The importance of offering a broad curriculum within the school system cannot be over-stated, allowing students to explore a range of topics that spark their interest, and potentially inspire them to follow a career path that can have a positive impact on their lives, society and the environment. STEM activities (built around Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) offer a broad range of opportunities, opening up the potential of enquiry based learning that is relevant to the world we live in. Many education systems globally place a great emphasis on a STEM curriculum for all students, no matter of age, race, gender or ability, but what STEM based activities work best in your setting, helping students see the world differently, and potentially inspiring to enter STEM careers of the future?"

Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.

"Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO)."

Posting on edudemic

Online learning from former Stanford profs - build a search engine, or a robotic car

Udacity is a totally new kind of learning experience. You learn by solving challenging problems and pursuing udacious projects with world-renowned university instructors (not by watching long, boring lectures). At Udacity, we put you, the student, at the center of the universe.

"Google and Stanford are more than just neighbors in Silicon Valley. They're becoming the leaders in the online learning revolution. And it's all happening fast and starting right about … now. Stanford, like Google, has now announced a free and open source platform that lets you run your very own Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Stanford's platform, dubbed Class2Go, has big and slightly different aspirations from its competitors. Developed as a non-profit project by eight Stanford Computer Science engineers, Class2Go is meant to offer not only a course-like project but also tools for collaborative research. The latter functionality is a change from what Google, edX, Coursera, and others are offering right now."

Preparing today's youth to solve tomorrow's greatest problems is not something any one person, community or corporation can do alone. Non-profit organizations and the hands-on learning opportunities they provide are often the catalyst that sparks a young person's lifelong exploration of science, technology, engineering and math.

The Concord Consortium is a nonprofit educational research and development organization based in Concord, Massachusetts. We create interactive materials that exploit the power of information technologies.

Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?

The Learning Technology Institute was founded in 1975 as a non-profit public interest corporation 501C(3) devoted to research, development, organization management, and education activities in connection with the use of technology and computers in knowledge engineering, systems design, and technology-based information delivery systems.

Most schools that have integrated laptop computers and other digital devices into learning are not following the paths necessary to maximize the use of technology in ways that will raise student achievement and help save money, a report concludes."We all know that technology does things to improve our lives, but very few schools are implementing properly," said Leslie Wilson, a co-author of the study, "The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness," released last month. She is the chief executive officer of the Mason, Mich.-based One-to-One Institute, which advocates putting mobile-computing devices into the hands of all students.

As technology evolves and its inner workings increasingly disappear from view, replaced with solid-state parts hidden by glass, aluminium and plastic, our understanding of what makes the world operate is similarly impeded. When machinery from just a few decades ago is viewed a world of moving parts, linkages, cogs and levers is revealed. These mechanical objects contain an inherent beauty and inspire curiosity in ways that modern devices with their pristine surfaces and simplified design language do not. Opportunities to explore devices from the past open our eyes and lead us to new questions of how our devices function, how machines do the jobs we need them to do and how engineers solve problems.

By Tina Barseghian ...Fast forward a couple of decades (or more) and we see that the career landscape has changed so drastically that jobs need new definitions. Social media strategist, app developer, mobile web engineer?

I cannot get enough of the new add-on features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Granted, they are just re-engineered scripts from the gallery, but this feature how now made them so much easier to find and configure. If you're not excited by this, you're not using GAFE!