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Goof-off time shouldn’t be limited to summer vacation: it’s important all year.

st American children in the not-so-distant past, “going out to play” was the norm. Today, according to a University of Michigan study,

Just an hour a day of vigorous play — running, chasing, games like tag or dodge ball, and even dealing with or avoiding being excluded from these activities — can provide intense skill learning.

Girls swept the board in national curriculum tests for seven-year-olds, beating boys in every paper – reading, writing, speaking and listening, maths and science. The biggest gap was in writing, where one in four boys failed to reach the standard expected, compared with just 13 per cent of girls.

Attracting females is key to the future of computer science, Rodger says. In 2008, only 11.8 percent of U.S. bachelor's degrees in computer science went to women, according to the Computing Research Association. And Duke's showing is hardly better, said Rodger, who is trying to turn that around by making programming fun to learn.

The effects of growing up in poverty, particularly for children raised in socially isolated, economically depressed urban areas, warrants greater concern, especially given that one out of every three Black children is raised in a poor household.(20) Here the evidence is clear that the risks faced by children, particularly African American males, in terms of health, welfare, and education, are substantially greater.(21) A recent longitudinal study on the development of children whose mothers used drugs (particularly crack cocaine) during pregnancy found that when compared to children residing in similar neighborhoods from similar socio-economic backgrounds, the children in the sample showed no greater evidence of long term negative effects. This is not because the incidence of physical and cognitive problems among the sample was not high, but because it was equally high for the control group. The stunned researchers, who fully expected to observe noticeable differences between the two groups, were compelled to conclude that the harmful effects of living within an impoverished inner-city environment outweighed the damage inflicted by early exposure to drugs.(22)