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
Born to Create - The Next Generation of Creative Artists
Right now, entrepreneurship or more specifically tech-based entrepreneurship is definitely en-vogue. This glamorization of what is a really tough calling has been building for years with the current generation. From the pioneers in the field like Bill Gates (Microsoft) to the modern day champions like Mark Zuckerberg (Snapchat), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Elon Musk (Tesla); it seems like entrepr...
5 Tips to Prevent Summer Learning Loss
This is an exciting time for lots of parents and students around the country. Some students will complete pre-K/Kindergarten and enter elementary school. Others will finish elementary school and begin middle school. Another group will finish middle school and enter high school. Regardless of whether there is a major shift from high school to college or intermediate step that involves advancing ...
The Jobs of Tomorrow
As a company that works with kids, we think a lot about the future. We imagine what trends will impact our current students, we think about what kind of jobs they might have, and we think about how we can play a role in helping prepare them for success given those inputs. One of the popular schools of thought as it relates to the necessity for teaching computer coding and engineering skills is ...
Designing the perfect tech learning environment
“The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, the children are now working as if I did not exist.” – Maria Montessori One of the areas that we think a lot about is how to design the perfect learning environment for kids to learn how to solve problems by leveraging technology-based solutions. While we don’t claim to have all the answers, we do believe that we have found a cou...
Impostors, No More!
"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." - Henry Ford According to a review of 308 studies involving over 1.1 million girls and boys from 30 countries, girls have been outperforming boys in all subjects (reading, language, math and science) for nearly a century. Despite their performance, there is a nearly universal belief that boys are better at math &...
Coders are the new Superheroes!
This past Friday, April 28th, was National Superhero Day. According to the dictionary, a superhero is defined as, “a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers; also, an exceptionally skillful or successful person.” When I was a kid, my favorite superhero was Superman. He was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a singl...
Different Perspectives
When I began my career in the epicenter of the domestic automobile industry (Detroit, Michigan), I was surrounded by customers and consequently vehicles from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Every time, I would see a vehicle from a competing automaker, I thought that we had to work much harder to win against our local competitors. Rarely did I see a vehicle from Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW or ...
Self-Driving Cars, Powered by Humans.....Coming Soon!
As a former automotive engineer at Ford Motor Company, this has been an exciting week. First, Tesla announced that they would launch electric and self-driving pick-up and commercial trucks. It is widely believed that these vehicles will be equipped with self-driving technology as current model Tesla’s have this feature. Toward the end of the week, it was discovered that Apple had received appro...
3 Easy Ways to Keep Your Kids Engaged with Technology
As parents, we want the best for our kids. My wife and I will do anything and everything we can to help encourage and develop our kids to reach their full potential. Oftentimes, this means having them experiment with a lot of different extra-curricular activities until they find something that fits. Since my children are either in elementary or pre-K, we don’t believe that you can meaningfully ...
Fostering a 'Creator's Mindset' for your child!
Note: This blog post originally appeared as a guest post on the Meez Meals blog.“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay, Computer Scientist While there are some who are busy imagining how the world might become a better place. There are others who are actively engaged in the creative process of building innovative solutions to make a dent in the universe – turning their ...
Belief | A Key Element of Learning to Code
“If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.” – Henry Ford In educational environments, the above quote should be amended to reflect the impact of the instructor belief on a child’s internalized belief in their capabilities. Over the years, researchers have taken on the important question of teacher’s expectations within the academic environment. It is estimated that 5-...
Computer Coding Sandwich Challenge
We are constantly in search of creative ways to introduce kids to the concepts of computer programming and engineering logic. We initially launched a fun sandwich making exercise to introduce your kid to coding at home. We thought it would be fun to take this project further and have parents and kids make fun videos showing their kids going through this exercise. Here's an example of a video th...
Learning to Code at 35 years old
Throughout childhood, I enjoyed learning especially about any and all things electronic. From remote controls cars to VCR’s, I just had to take them apart and learn about what was inside. This of course led to many broken electronics around my home because while I was skilled at taking things apart, I wasn’t so great at putting them back together. Thankfully, my parents didn’t impede my learnin...
Balancing a mixed-grade classroom to maximize individual learning
After years of working in math and computer science education, you tend to discover principles of learning that are distilled from thousands of lessons with different learners. A core idea that keeps coming to mind is that beginners need structure and experts need freedom. It seems like common sense, but I think applying this principle can be tricky in practice, especially when there are multip...
Should Digital Adventures launch a Kids’ Coding Hack-A-Thon?
In sports-based activities, there is typically a portion of the week focused on practice or skill development that concludes with an exhibition (game). Since games have a binary outcome (win or lose), it enables participants to learn what they need to focus on during the following week in order to continue developing their skills. Over the course of the season, kids play a series of games befo...