Online course for teachers, parents: Helping students to love math. By Jonathan Rabinovitz The 18 freshmen in Professor Jo Boaler's seminar had demonstrated the academic promise needed to gain admission to Stanford, so it was striking that they shared a similar fear: mathematics. "I subconsciously thought either you were or you weren't good at math," said one student, Chloe Colberg, echoing the views of many in the class. Indeed, that notion prevails in schools across the nation, and Boaler, a professor of education, has made it her mission to change that attitude. Lisa F. Young / Shutterstock Professor Jo Boaler's new online course provides teachers and parents with a different way to teach mathematics, an approach that her research has shown helps students to overcome their fear of the subject while also improving their academic performance.
The seminar that she offered last fall emphasized that math demands creativity, collaboration and discussion more than memorization, drills and just hurrying to get the right answers. Emma Duggan Media Contact 6 Stumble. Is Technology Making Us Less Human? This article is one-half of a point-counterpoint with Ray Kurzweil's article, "The Man-Machine Merger. " I'm sitting in this café in Silicon Valley, watching conversations flowing between Macs, tablets, mobile devices, and their owners. I’m imagining the volume of information that is being streamed back and forth just from this one, small public space.
That thought blows my mind. Never have we had greater access to knowledge than we do right now—limitless information just a few clicks away, the line between man and machine increasingly blurred. But what are we sacrificing when we tether our brains to our mobile devices, relying on them to tell us when we’re hungry, where we should go for cocktails, what driving route we should take, and what we should buy our significant others for their birthdays? Is all of this connectivity helping us to evolve into a more intelligent species, as some futurists speculate, or is this actually hurting us? Your brain is like a muscle. Why I Want to Be Chipped. Technology is (or was?) Meant to help humanity simplify certain tasks. You know, make us lazier our lives easier. But given our current trajectory, we may end up like the piles of putty in Wall-E that represent the fleshy future of humanity as a sedentary race.
That is unless, we all get chipped. So let’s do it. Technology embedded in our bodies is currently the only means of gathering completely accurate health data. Sure, it may seem a little too extreme to get chipped for purposes of tracking our heart rates at the gym. We’re already moving in that direction. After the Wii, Microsoft and Sony followed suit with their own motion-controlled gaming peripherals and rightfully so.
Companies like Withings and Fitbit have learned from Nike, Jawbone, Nintendo, and Microsoft, and are attempting to move the ball forward by way of gamification. If that doesn’t sound a bit mad scientist, I don’t know what does. But until that day comes, I need to go for a run. The Robots Are Coming: Roundup. If the thought of robots working side-by-side with humans to clean our homes and hospitals—and land stealth jet airplanes—frightens you, stop reading right now. It’s been a busy month for robot-related news. iRobot recently announced a new generation of floor-cleaning robots for your house. The lightweight, disc-shaped Scooba 390 will scrub, wash and squeegee your floors with 30% longer battery life than its predecessors for around 850 square feet per charge, iRobot says.
CNET has all the details of the $500 device. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that iRobot is also building a commercial-grade fleet of robotic cleaners for hospitals. And iRobot is not alone, the WSJ says. If cleaning isn’t exciting enough for you, then global security firm Northrop Grumman has you covered. The goal is for aircraft carrier crews to use the same take-off and landing hand gestures for human or robot planes.