The Digital Adventures Blog
For parents, educators and students to discuss tech education for kids, best practices for teaching coding & engineering design to kids & emerging technology trends
Featured Posts
5 Tips to Keep Your Kids Safe from Dangerous Viral Video Challenges
Let’s face it in a world dominated by social media, everyone wants their 30 seconds of fame. Whether the digital currency is likes, shares, retweets or comments; there is a great deal of social capital that is conferred on those whose content goal viral. Combine this with the still developing brain of children and the associated peer pressure, this desire for internet popularity can go terribly...
The Importance of Teaching Kids to Love Learning
Technological ProgressThe evolution in technology is a wonderful thing. In today’s world, we can connect with friends and colleagues across the globe at the touch of a button. We can verbally converse with semi-sentient robots living in our phones (Siri) and homes (Alexa) and find out anything from travel directions to daily trivia questions. We can even order cupcakes-in-a-bottle with overn...
10 Surprising Lessons We’ve Learned From Teaching Over 1,000 Kids to Code
Digital Adventures was founded in 2015 with the mission to teach kids how to build with technology so they can change the world! Since opening our first learning studio on the North Shore of Chicago, we’ve taken more than 1,000 students through our fun, engaging, hands-on coding and engineering design projects. During that time, we’re proud to have earned over 50 5 Star Reviews on Google, Yelp ...
5 Steps Parents Can Take to Prevent Their Kids' Technology Addiction
For the past several years, technology has started to play a larger and larger role in all aspects of our personal and professional lives. Initially, technology applications were used to develop increased efficiencies within professional settings - think robotic welders in automotive factories or word processing software in corporations. For the last several decades, we have seen generations of...
The Ultimate Guide for How to Pick a Computer for Your Child
One of the most frequent questions that we are asked at Digital Adventures is, ‘how do I pick a computer for my child?’ so that they can build with technology on their own. This is an important question and one that is more appropriate for a comprehensive guide so that parents and students can have easy access to this reference going forward. There are many key considerations that parents shoul...
Technology Learning is Foundational
Over the last several months, there has been an ongoing debate over whether or not coding and engineering design skills are necessary for the well-rounded education of the next generation. Some criticisms of teaching kids to code include that this is just a covert operation for big technology companies to increase the pipeline of workers to reduce the massive compensation packages for current e...
The Greatest Gifts for Kids
At Digital Adventures, we have many opportunities to work with a variety of kids on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Our privileged position as instructional provider for technology based learning has enabled us to observe some key trends about what kids seem to value most. As a parent who is just starting out (rookie) or one who has been at this for quite some time (veteran), we thou...
Digital Adventures - You're Fired!
As we think about our privileged role in the development of the technical education of the next generation, our ultimate goal is for students and their parents to fire us. In order for us to part ways, we focus on 3 key areas while working with our students. Our goal is for our students to develop their independence in building with technology, understand how to make their ideas real and learni...
6 Tips for Picking a Great Summer Tech Camp
Now that the kids are out of school for their summer vacation, it’s a great time to think about how to continue to engage them in learning opportunities that will further their development and growth to prevent the dreaded ‘summer learning loss’. One of the best options is to enroll your kids in summer camp. There are a wide variety of camps that cover many different topics. With the increased...
4 Tips for Graduates From a 3X Student
Around this time of a year, parents and kids celebrate an important milestone….graduation. Whether it’s my youngest son, finishing pre-K or my daughter completing elementary school; this is a truly a special time of the year. Over the course of my life, I’ve had the good fortune to earn 3 degrees (BS Mechanical Engineering - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, MS Mechanical Engineering - U...
Helping a billion people with technology
Did you know that there are an estimated 1 billion people around the globe who have a disability? Because their disability often prevents them from doing work, their poverty rate is almost twice as high as the general population. On the other hand, we have witnessed extreme examples of the intelligence and world changing impact of those who are disabled in people like Stephen Hawking. In orde...
In 10 Years These 3 Things Won't Change
"I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stabl...
Disruptive Potential of Technological Innovation - Google AI Assistant
This past week, Google introduced the Google Assistant – an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant. During the demonstration of the product, the CEO of Google (Sundar Pinchai) let us listen in to the personal assistant using natural language to book a hair appointment. While booking a hair appointment might seem trivial, the possibilities for humans if computers can begin to better...
4 Tips to Prevent Summer Technology Learning Loss
As we near the end of the school year, teachers, students and parents are ready for a well-deserved break. However, between trips to the swimming pool and Popsicle purchases from the ice cream truck; it is important that we don’t lose all the progress that was made during the school year. Academic studies summarize summer learning loss as having the following characteristics: (1) students’ achi...
Build with Technology. Change the World!
One of the great things about teaching kids to build with technology is that it equips them with the skills necessary to develop solutions at scale that can truly change the world. In this blog post, we will highlight a few world changing applications that are already in flight with the hopes of inspiring the next generation to build upon this foundation of invention and innovation from their p...