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
The Lack of Technology Struggle is Hurting our Kids
When I was a kid, there was a high level of struggle inherent in learning to build and engage with technology. If I wanted to play a video game on the computer, I had to type in a bunch of commands. And, even after I corrected all the typos, that was no guarantee that the game would load up.Or, if my friends and I were playing Nintendo and wanted to switch games; there was a chance that the new...
The Best Teachers Mathematically
No this isn’t a post about how the best teachers are math teachers although I do love math as it forms the foundation for much of my educational and professional experience. Instead, I want to share the idea of how good teaching can be thought of using a mathematical framework.In my estimation, the best teachers are always focused on how to maximize the individual potential of each student. Sin...
Becoming a global shaper
The New York Times recently published an article outlining the two codes, computer science and the U.S. Constitution, kids need to learn in order to make in impact in their career and with their life. This conclusion was based on research conducted by The College Board (administrators of the SAT) that found these two areas were highly correlated with success. Since that time, The College Board ...
Overnight success starts today
By the time someone like Bill Gates (Microsoft) or Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square) or Sheryl Sandberg (Google & Facebook) or Marissa Mayer (Google & Yahoo), it may seem like their success was immediate and predictable.However, if you dig a bit deeper, you will learn that each of these experts spent years developing and honing their abilities. With repeated pr...
Just build it! - You don't need permission to create
With the polar vortex creating the coldest temperatures in decades in Chicago, the local school districts decided that the conditions were unsafe and so kids were out of school for a few days. Since they had 2 days without the burdens of school, my kids were free to organize their days around what they were interested.My daughter decided that she would create a drawing of a flower using Scratch...
NO - You can’t learn to code in an hour
There are profound joys and utter disappointments that come with educating kids. Personally, I’ve always said that having kids is one of the longest term, high risk, high reward investments one can make. For at least 18 years but often for their entire lives, parents invest in their children in hopes that they will be successful. It isn’t until some point far in the future where we know whether...
Why technology excels at creating teachable moments
One of the best parts about being within the education space generally is being able to participate in teachable moments. Whether teaching math, science or philosophy, there is nothing like illustrating a concept and seeing the gears start to turn in a student’s head and then having them ask a question that enables you to solidify the lesson for both the individual and the group.At Digital Adve...
3 key learnings from launching our new edtech product BrainSports
This past Fall we launched a new edtech product, BrainSports. Our goal was to bring together elements of sports (training, competition, community) while also re-imagining an educational framework for teaching our students coding & engineering design skills that will power their future success.During the Fall season, students in both our Lincoln Park & Wilmette studios worked towards bui...
Tech's Broken Promises
We aren’t living up to the promised potential of technology. Solutions are supposed to make the world a better place. They are supposed to help fix the immense challenges in a difficult world. As of late, technology is falling short of its promised potential. From the recent insight that most of the internet is fake to the influence large scale social media platforms can have on elections aroun...
Every Company is NOW a Technology Company
While Netflix was originally founded as a company designed to change the viewing behavior of consumers by sending them DVD’s via mail. Over time, the company began streaming content via the internet using a combination of data & analytics to drive high levels of customer engagement. In order to satisfy the growing demand for content and insulate itself against the competition, Netflix began...
3 Ways Tech Builds Problem Solving Skills
One of the major challenges in an unpredictable and ever-changing world is the ability to creatively solve problems.Technology is one of the most useful platforms to not only create the solutions that will be broadly useful but also to simultaneously build the problem solving muscle with practice.Through repeated interaction and engagement with hardware and software platforms, we’ve found that ...
We Teach More Than Just Technology Skills
As an education technology program, our primary focus is teaching kids how to build with technology so they can one day change the world. However, there are also skills that students develop that go beyond just the 1 and 0’s of building hardware and software projects. In fact, there are key areas embedded within education technology that help build not just technical skills but also those skil...
Should my kid learn how computers work?
Many parents will often ask us a variety of questions about computer coding and programming. Embedded within their question is a curiosity about whether or not this technology acumen is really for their child. Or, at times, it may even be an insecurity because of something that someone told them when they were a kid about who should learn about computers and who shouldn’t. And, often there is a...
Kids Will Save us from Bad Tech
Over the last several months, the rising influence and impact of technology in our daily lives has fallen out of favor in popular culture. From the use of the Facebook platform to influence the Presidential election to Google helping build a censored search engine in China. Everyone is now realizing just how powerful hardware and software companies can be.And while technology has undoubtedly ma...
7 Surprising Ways Fortnite Changed Game Development Forever
Love it or hate it, but if you know a child who is in elementary, middle or high school; they know about Fortnite. Even if you don’t think you know about Fortnite, if you’ve been around kids at anytime during the last 18 months, you’ve probably seen them emulating the dances popularized in the game.Fortnite is a global phenomenon that was launched 18 months ago. Since launch, it has taken the g...