How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses. You can read a version of this story in Spanish here.
Pueden leer una versión de esta historia en español aquí. José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. Arguments Rhétologiques Fallacieux. This Augmented-Reality Sandbox Turns Dirt Into a UI.
Developed by a team of researchers at UC Davis, these augmented-reality sandboxes let kids learn while getting their hands dirty.
Photo: Rhys George We’ve seen how kids take to touchscreens. To them, our unfathomably sophisticated smartphones and tablets are about as hard to figure out as a bucket full of blocks. Hair. Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Updated 7/16/2013 – See Original Here Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe.
As you may have discovered yourself, tic-tac-toe is terminally dull. Can a Puppy Sell a CMS? We all know humans are hardly rational agents when it comes to buying decisions, often emotional reactions plays almost as large a role as facts, figures and logic.
Choosing a CMS is often a long process involving careful evaluation of the flexibility of the content model, the power of the template engine, the level of separation between design and content, etc. But even so, there's still plenty of space for the purely irrational to play a role. A while ago we launched an interesting little test to dig into the effect of emotional engagement. In this case we decided to test the click through rate rate on our call to action at the bottom of most of our pages where we urge people to give our 30 day free trial a shot. Before and After Here's how it used to look: Our goal was to see if adding an element of emotional pressure would motivate site visitors to click the signup button. So we went all out. Did it Work? So how did the puppy fare against our standard call to action? The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy) Not too long ago, Jenna Bilotta wrote an excellent article called, How designers and engineers can play nice[1], in which she talks about ways for designers and engineers to work more productively.
Having faced similar challenges working with designers (and also working with engineers, when I was on the UI side), I appreciate the pragmatic approach she suggests. It always helps to respect the other role’s process and understand their thinking when working together. One of her points for engineers was not to say “no” so quickly. That one stuck with me for a while and swam around in my head. My first reaction was, “but you don’t understand why we say no!” Browse » Pop Culture. The Writing Revolution - Peg Tyre. For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs.
So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle. Play Don't Look Back. The best interface is no interface. The actual work-flow of the NFC enabled Google Wallet is actually already much simpler than what you present. 1.
Unlock phone, 2. Tap NFC enabled payment device with your phone, 3. Wallet auto starts, enter Wallet PIN, 4. Pay using default payment method" @Matthew: Thanks. The opportunity for No UI in automobiles is ripe, and already pretty rich. @Nate Thanks! TEDxStanford - Tina Seelig - A crash course in creativity. Knowledge Workers are Bad at Working (and Here’s What to Do About It…) November 21st, 2012 · 107 comments An Inconvenient Observation Knowledge workers are bad at working.
I say this because unlike every other skilled labor class in the history of skilled labor, we lack a culture of systematic improvement. If you’re a professional chess player, you’ll spend thousands of hours dissecting the games of better players. If you’re a promising young violin player, you’ll attend programs like Meadowmount’s brutal 7-week crash course, where you’ll learn how to wring every last drop of value from your practicing.