There’s a buzz around making learning digital, no doubt spurred by Apple’s recent declaration that iBooks 2 is the future of education. Now, the US government has come out in support of digital learning, claiming that all the country’s students will be using digital textbooks within five years. But can that really happen? More »
Admittedly, I did spend my childhood playing with explosives. But I certainly never had as much success as 10-year-old Clara Lazen (not pictured), who accidentally created a new energy storing molecule, tetranitratoxycarbon, that could be used as an explosive. More »
When OK Go were asked to appear on Sesame Street, the result was always going to be great. Their contribution, a song and stop-motion animation explaining the primary colours, is wonderful. Show it to your kids, or just watch it yourself. More »
Many of us don’t learn in optimal ways. We know that we forget new material, neglect to review older material, and study in ways that elevate cramming and procrastination to art forms. But there is research about how to be more efficient in these things. For example, dating back to 1885, there is a rich literature that explores how timing our learning of new and old material can affect education. More »
If you have aspirations of your bundle of joy being one day accepted at Harvard, winning a Nobel Prize or even exploring the stars, starting them off with baby rattles and pacifiers isn’t going to cut it. More »
Remember when Stanford offered those university-level Computer Science courses for free? Now the professor who ran them is leaving Stanford to start a project that will offer nothing but free CS online classes. More »
It’s a bit easier to comprehend just how vast and empty our solar system really is with a copy of Mishka Henner’s Astronomical, which squeezes a scale model of our sun and planets into a 12-volume 6000-page tome. More »
Is what Apple showed us today future of education? The future we’d all been imagining for decades, no less. Harry Potter stuff. More »
It was almost definitely not the first time Apple thought about how to revolutionise textbooks and education, but Joe Peters and a couple of Apple interns won its annual iContest, “sort of an American Idol for great ideas that gives interns a chance to present their best thoughts to executives”, by presenting a plan for cheap digital textbooks to enthusiastic Apple execs back in 2008, two years before the iPad was loosed on the world. More »
You may not be able to afford it, but Apple’s textbook transformation is pretty neat. Its hands-on time, class. Find a cosy seat, use your indoor voices and read along with Gizmodo. Today’s lesson: science! More »
