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Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) January 24, 2012 SMALLab Learning LLC has launched a new embodied learning environment and multiple lessons for the learning environment called Flow. Flow brings embodied learning to any existing Interactive Whiteboard or projection surface using a single motion-capture camera, similar to the Xbox Kinect™.

Is this his warm up for us? I don't think teachers need more money. I think they want teaching contexts that are designed to work. Spend the money on that and teachers will feel great that they can perform in an environment that makes sense.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop studied almost 200 education apps for Apple's app store. Good insight into what's in the market right now and what the current trends are.

Thanks Chris! I am looking forward to reading this thoroughly. It covers so many important topics/questions from: creating standards for apps marketed as educational (right now the developers just need to say it is "educational") to a call to academia to dive into research and help design effective, high quality material for digital age learning.

Seems like a good EMF design.

Thinking of the peripheral implications of technology in school. Architecture and interior design need to be really smart.

When you design a didgital product, it pays to look ahead and see what is coming around the corner.

Our schools and system are mostly designed for extroverts and for their need of lots of stimulations. The ideal students in schools are believed to be extroverts although researches show that introverted students tend to be more knowledgable. Instead of emphasizing too much on group work which benefit both extroverts and introverts, schools should also teach students how to work on their own. That's because solitude is critical for creativity and where deep thoughts are formed.

an interesting point from the article: "adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards-or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do."

I really enjoyed this article, thank you. I find it very interesting to explore from a neurological perspective how some aspects of our modern world impact children and teens. So often parents say that the world is different today, but it is important to realize that the way we function does not change so quickly.

I noticed this article as well - I think it's absolutely fascinating! Now I'm curious about the implications of these findings for designing educational technologies for adolescents: how can products take advantage of these proclivities? A more difficult question would be - is there any way that technologies can counteract these tendencies in order to bring more balance/rationality into a teenager's world?

Interesting article and video about a new way of teaching children to program. A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time. The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.

I just heard about this from a friend and then stumbled across your link - and then wound up on the Raspberry Pi website to try to find out more about the education component of it (which is supposedly the whole motivation). Right now, the website is focused on showcasing the capabilities of the device and the hardware/software choices that they made. I was disappointed to find, when looking through their FAQ, that there is only one small blurb about educational material in which they vaguely state that support resources are currently under development. No doubt they are allowing a greater number of people access to a cheap Linux machine, but that does not mean those people are going to use it to learn to program. I'll be interested to see if the focus really does shift to education as the resources come together... right now it just seems like a cool new toy for a Linux geek (with the potential to be so much more!)

With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.

"Initiatives seek to give students permanent online records for developing specific skills"

A quick overview of digital badges (including pros/cons re intrinsic/extrinsic motivation) and introduction of "Badge Economy" ["With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla has developed an Open Badge Infrastructure, or OBI, designed to become the underlying technical scaffolding for badges," where user can collect badges earned in a digital backpack.]

Description: Based upon multiple studies with over 15,000 gamers, this presentation defines and reviews three specific motivational needs that are directly related to sustained engagement and value. The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) focuses specifically on experiences of competence, autonomy and relatedness satisfactions. Game examples and strategies for maximizing these satisfactions are discussed.

No game noises made the list, but still an interesting thing to think about when it comes to design, marketing, and even possibly engagement

Another e-reader option

Moral Kombat takes a look into the controversial subject of violence in video games. Director Spencer Halpin shows the constant conflict between the game creators' first amendment right to make a violent game and the eminent threat that violence poses on the next generation. In addition, the film is full of the latest green screen and high-definition technology that allow watchers to actually envision the world of gaming. Filled with interviews from lead game designers, politicians, parents, and psychologists, this film provides a candid take on the influence games have on youth today.

Virtual reality field trips!

Interesting article about how certain features of video games (gaining experience points, forming guilds, etc.) are being incorporated in unexpected ways in our lives.