With today's high numbers of toddlers playing with tablets and phones it's great to see there is a educational toy like Bo and Yana. They help take little kids fascinations with tablets and turn it into a way for them to learn problem solving using Bo and Yana.
After several weeks of wrangling and a couple of weeks of solid work, we're wrapping up our first round of lessons built from existing teacher content this week. It's been an interesting process, taking materials that are usually delivered on paper and converting them into an interactive tablet experience. The transcription part is easy - even typing materials out by hand doesn't take very long, and copy/paste takes even less time. The interesting part is coming to terms with the ways in which the technology makes you think about the content differently. A couple of examples:
1. If students can move at their own pace, and storage is free, you quickly realize that you want MORE - more videos, more references, more quizzes. Different students will be reached by different presentation styles, and if they don't have to wait for the class to catch up, you want them to keep going. We spent a lot of time adding, fleshing out, and finding several different ways to communicate the same idea.
2. Being able to see a lesson as a playlist and flip through it makes you think hard about when to switch learning styles. The flow of a lesson becomes an interesting challenge, bouncing between Watch, Read, and Do in order to engage different parts of the brain and combat fatigue. Everyone, adults included, needs some variety in their activities in order to stay focused, and Thumbprint's lesson layout turns out to be a very effective way of highlighting areas where one form of engagement is being leaned on too heavily.
I'm very proud of the team's work on these lessons, and I look forward to a lively discussion with the teachers about how the materials can be further improved.
The technology you're born with has no history. There's no instinctual difference between animal husbandry and the internal combustion engine, for example - you've had them for your whole life. And the radically new stuff, which to us seems controversial, or faddish, or dangerous, is completely normal to kids. And in 20 years, we'll all think that way, and we'll move on to having the same argument about some new doodad.
Yeah, everyone's split, but this is worth reading because if you don't know about Raspberry Pi, you should. Maybe the most revolutionary thing you can buy at any price, and at $30, what's stopping you?
Lots of raw numbers, but I think everyone should have them committed to memory when it comes to climate change.
There are lots of advantages to working from home in your pyjamas, but the biggest drawback is that you don't get to watch smart people work on a project and eat pizza. I think this is an important experience that everyone should have - if you're not doing this, go and find some smart people and give them pizza. In this picture they're working on creating a math lesson. Math! See? I told you it was fun. Enjoy your weekend.
