While Russia may have taken first place in the race to put both K-9 and Man in space, a team of enterprising Canadian students recently achieved a previously unclaimed milestone in intergalactic exploration: First MiniFig in Space.
As followers of our blog can readily attest, we’re suckers for all things LEGO, Kids, and Space… so no surprise that the team here at LPT headquarters cheered the whole way up. Gooooooo Canada! (PS: we like TimBits!)
Our friends at Latitude Research and Project Synthesis just partnered with the LEGO Learning Institute (let’s be friends too!) to produce a great report on three of our favorite topics: kids, storytelling, and ROBOTS!
With this study, the team asked a group of elementary school students to tell a story about what life would be like with their own robot. The research team then coded the stories to see what commonalities existed across stories and learn more about how robots might help to encourage play, learning, and creativity. Without spoiling too much of the report, we were particularly interested to hear that (unlike many adults), the kids tended to talk about their robots as friends and mentors rather than tools – a sibling or cousin with just a bit more knowledge/experience (but, as Vygotsky would note, still well within the ZPD).
It’s a great read for anyone interested in qualitative research, education, play, sentient beings… you know all the cool things in life. Here’s the Full Report.
Here at Launchpad Toys, we’re big believers in the powers of ALL media to educate and inform. Some do it better than others, of course, and some subjects/curricula (i.e. storytelling) carry more value than others (i.e. alien brain munching), but its not as binary as some “experts” or retail store shelves would make you think. With that in mind, we really enjoyed this graphic put together by Online Colleges and KQED MindShift (one of our favorite EdTech blogs). From Oregon Trail to SimCity to Angry Birds, all video games (if used correctly) can be effective tools for education.
Check out the full infographic after the break. (more…)
We’re big fans of Story Arcs here at Launchpad Toys and, of course, big fans of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly Player Piano). A good story isn’t just a simple narrative sequence (beginning, middle, and end), but a carefully structured series of events (Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax, Resolution) that sweeps the reader/viewer through an undulating swing of emotions (see the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s UP). Imagine our delight at finding this video of Vonnegut teaching Story Arcs to a class of college students… now if only they had played with Toontastic as kids!
Frequenters to this here LPT blog may have noticed a bit of a dropoff in the past two weeks: along with new updates and new hires, Thushan and I have spent the summer hacking away at Y Combinator (a startup incubator here in Silicon Valley) and have been quite sidetracked in the ramp-up to YC’s vaunted Demo Day. After a few whirlwind weeks of pitches, interviews, hooplah, and ballyhoo, I sat down yesterday to reflect on the big takeaways of the summer… and how YC has shattered my childhood dreams.
Like most kids of the sci-fi loving 80’s, I grew up under the general assumption that my not-so-distant-future would be shared with robots, androids, clones, and other mass-produced sentient beings. As sure as we put a man on the moon, it was only a matter of time before I’d have my very own gold-plated personal translator, a laundry-folding domestic servant, and a fully programmable baby sister. Sure, there was the off-chance that Skynet would turn on us or that my Boombox might one day transform into a Decepticon, but I was fairly optimistic about a harmonious union of robot and man.
Jennie Cho Magiera is a 4th and 5th grade math teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. She’s a big fan of Toontastic and writes today about how she will be integrating it into her math lessons this fall.
Toontastic, at first glance, appears to be best suited for the reading and writing classroom. One could also see it in a social studies curriculum. However – math?! No way – right?
I disagree. Math, I daresay, is also a creative venture.
Consider mathematics as it is taught in the traditional classroom. The teacher stands in front of students, gives them some sort of instructional input, then the students “practice” this by completing problem sets, worksheets, etc. (more…)
This week, the Lincoln Center Institute is hosting “the first national conference focused on making imagination an integral part of American Education”. Jeffrey Brown from PBS NewsHour sat down with Scott Noppe-Brandon of the Lincoln Center Institute to discuss.
“Most of the time when we think about teaching, we’re thinking about the content area or the discipline alone. We’re looking at teaching math, teaching science, teaching English, but we’re not always talking about how you teach it and what’s the method or the creative tools by which you deliver that. So in that instance we’re trying to look at how to help no matter what the students are learning and no matter what the teacher is teaching the delivery system or the education process for that. If you look at it from the perspective of how you can help people become more imaginative, you can build it into education. For us, that’s through what we call the capacities for imaginative learning, which is a series of habits of mind or ways in which any discipline or any subject can be taught.”
Go Scott! We’re big fans of incorporating Creative Learning across a variety of traditional disciplines, as are many of the teachers using Toontastic in their classrooms today (like Leah LaCrosse’s 5th grade Science Class). The full transcript of the interview is here.
We’re suckers for stories of kid empowerment here at LPT and just came across a gem that we thought we’d share with y’all: Scott Nesin’s 2004 journey to Home Depot with his then 4-year-old son (turned general contractor). We won’t spoil it for you other than to reiterate the moral of the story: never underestimate a 4-year-old with big dreams.
The story is called Wood Tape. Take 5 minutes to read it through – smile guaranteed.
A Creativity Crisis? You betcha! Thankfully, there are a lot of creative people out there with creative ideas for encouraging creative learning… creatively. Enter No Right Brain Left Behind: a “Speed Innovation” challenge for industry to design and develop programs to address the Creativity Crisis. Brilliant!
Bad News: The submission deadline has passed for 2011
Good News: The site features all of the genius ideas! Take a gander.
We’re big fans of GOOD magazine here at Launchpad Toys, but just recently discovered a (not so hidden) gem on their site: Infographics! This mini-survey on technology enhanced learning (click for full-size) is just one of many beautifully crafted insights into an array of social, political, and cultural issues. Gooooooooo GOOD!
As inspiring as it is to look at, the stats are perhaps even more striking:
As we continue to build out our online Classroom Community for teachers, tutors, and homeschoolers, we’re increasingly encouraged by schools’ rapid adoption of powerful tools like the iPad for Creative Learning. Today, we thought we’d share two particularly encouraging signs of the Ed-volution:
