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
Keeping our Tech Talent in Chicago
We’re facing a generational crisis in our city. For the second year in a row, Chicago is the only one of America’s ten largest cities to see it's population decrease. Residents are leaving the entire Chicagoland area en masse, mostly for the Sun Belt states. The Chicago Tribune has found various reasons for this shift, including taxes, state budget issues, crime, the unemployment rate and weath...
Disrupting Your Child's Education
One of the most popular concepts when it relates to company performance is how they think about and integrate disruptive innovation into their business model. Many companies both large and small claim to be disruptive. In this post, we will consider disruptive innovation from an education perspective related to what kids are currently learning & how that content may be important to the futu...
Artificial Intelligence - Teaching Machines to Outsmart Humans
Over the past few weeks, there have been numerous articles on the topic of artificial intelligence: · For Superpowers, Artificial Intelligence Fuels New Global Arms Race – Wired· IBM Just committed $240 million to the Future of Artificial Intelligence – Futurism· Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence battle ‘most likely cause’ of WWIII – USA Today· Elon Musk & M...
I wanna be like Mike!
When I was a kid, Gatorade came out with this popular commercial entitled, “I wanna be like Mike”. In the background of the commercial showing Michael Jordan making some unbelievable moves, the words that played were –‘sometimes I dream that he is me, you’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be, like Mike….if I could be like Mike’. Michael Jordan was an amazing, once in a generation, sports phen...
Inventing the future
Millions of children around the country are returning to school; these new beginnings inevitably cause us to think about their future. As we see them off, we realize that they are a little older, a little wiser and full of enormous potential. As parents, guardians and educators, we also spend a lot of time thinking about how we best prepare our children for success. Not only do we think about ...
Beware the naysayers.....
Earlier this week, an article came out in the Globe and Mail entitled, “Coding for kids: another silly fad”. The author argues that while coding is the basis for giving instructions for a computer that most of us do not have to learn it any more than you have to understand an engine to drive a car or indoor plumbing to use a toilet. The writer then goes on to argue that the technology industry...
Inspired by Kids, Powered by Parents
“I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.” – Whitney Houston At Digital Adventures, we are fortunate to be in a position to prepare the next generation to have a big impact using technology as their platform. In the process, they will help make the world a better place for all of us. As we continue to build the business, I thought it would be good to re...
Learning to code is no accident
Since founding Digital Adventures and working with hundreds of kids on thousands of projects, we’ve discovered a fundamental truth; kids just want to play and build cool stuff they can show off to their friends and family. Our educational approach is based on accidental (or incidental) learning, and is designed to facilitate a dual purpose – enabling kids to have fun while they are learning. Ac...
10 Tips to Keep Your Kid Safe Online - Part 3
In this series, we will highlight 10 tips to help start the conversation around protecting our children in a digitally enabled world. The 1st part of the series focused on screen time, browser history checks and social media monitoring. In the 2nd part of the series, we will dig into being aware of illegal behavior, cyber-bullying and virus protection. For the 3rd and final part of the series, ...
10 Tips to Keep Your Kid Safe Online - Part 2
In this series, we will highlight 10 tips to help start the conversation around protecting our children in a digitally enabled world. The 1st part of the series focused on screen time, browser history checks and social media monitoring. In the 2nd part of the series, we will dig into being aware of illegal behavior, cyber-bullying and virus protection:Awareness of illegal behavior As the world ...
10 Tips to Keep Your Kid Safe Online - Part 1
While there are huge benefits to our kids developing digital fluency, there may also be associated risks if we aren’t mindful and aware of how we can best protect our children. As parents/guardians, our #1 goal is to keep our kids safe. Whether it is getting them swim lessons so that they are protected in the water or teaching them not to talk to strangers or advising them on the proper way to ...
10 reasons why your kid should learn to code - Part 3
In the first part of our series, we highlighted how technological disruption, technology fluency and how coding is the new language of business are key reasons why your kid should learn to code. In the second part, we outline how coding impacts the development of creative problem solving capabilities, influences their ability to communicate their ideas, teaches how to flex kid's entrepreneurial...
10 reasons why your kid should learn to code - Part 2
In the first part of our series, we highlighted how technological disruption, technology fluency and how coding is the new language of business are key reasons why your kid should learn to code. In the second part, we outline how coding impacts the development of creative problem solving capabilities, influences their ability to communicate their ideas, teaches how to flex kid's entrepreneurial...
10 reasons why your kid should learn to code - Part 1
Often when you are in neck deep in an industry, you might assume that everyone has the same framework or point of reference when it comes to the importance of kids learning to code. However, instead of assuming, we thought it would be important to clearly state the 10 reasons why we think your kid should learn to code. This will be a 3 part series. Without further ado, here are the 1st 3 reason...
5 Brain Boosting Benefits of Learning to Code
At a basic level, programming is writing a set of instructions for a computer to execute to achieve a desired output. Since computer coding is a relatively new discipline, there hasn’t yet been a ton of research on the associated brain benefits of learning this subject. However, a recent study helps shed some light on how the brain benefits from learning to program. In this study, 17 participan...