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
Chicago didn’t win the HQ2 Amazon lottery….now what?
A year ago, Amazon announced an RFP from cities around the country to compete to become the site of HQ2. In the RFP, Amazon highlighted considerations such as infrastructure, educated workforce, population, transportation and real estate. We wrote about all the great reasons why Chicago should be selected. This week, it was announced that Northern Virginia and New York city will be splitting t...
Stop Pretending That All Screen Time is the Same
Recently, the NYTimes published an article entitled, “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley”. This primary thesis of the article is that the technologists, who created the devices and the software that runs on them, are doing the best they can to keep their own kids away from these inventions. While that conclusion is intentionally shocking because it creat...
HELP…..how do I choose the best coding class topic for my kid?
With most educational topics in school, parents have typically had prior experience taking classes themselves or are aware of the natural progression in subjects like mathematics, science and reading. Unfortunately, for most parents, they don’t have a lot of experience with technology based topics. In addition, most formal courses of study in technology begin at the collegiate level and have no...
Didn’t win $1.537 Billion in Powerball? Try Tech Instead!
On Tuesday October 23rd, 2018, a single person in the great state of South Carolina won the $1.537B dollar jackpot in Powerball. This was the largest prize in the history of the lottery. A single ticket costs $2 and the odds of winning were roughly 1 in 300,000,000. This led to an unprecedented number of players tossing their hat in the ring for their chance at over a billion dollars.While cong...
11 Inspiring Videos for Why Kids Should Learn Coding
Technologists like Mitch Resnick, inventor of the Scratch Programming Language, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, have voiced support for teaching kids to learn coding. Successful immigrants like Ali & Hadi Partovi, the founders of code.org, have discussed how programming has positively impacted their lives.There are also examples of young kids who ...
6 Off-Screen Ways to Teach Coding Logic to Kids
While we often think of technology learning as the exclusive domain of screens and devices, there are also many other ways to introduce and develop the logic necessary to successfully build with technology. Below are 6 Off-Screen ways to teach coding logic to kids. 1. Sandwich Exercise One of the fundamentals of technology is to internalize that programming is the process of giving a series of ...
11 Tips to Help Prevent You & Your Kids from Being Hacked
Hacking seems to be occurring all the time. Just this week, we learned that China orchestrated a hack that targeted companies like Apple and Amazon with a tiny piece of hardware inserted onto the motherboard of very powerful servers. While most of us are not as enticing of a target as trillion dollar companies. This example does prove that hacking is something that we are all going to have to l...
26 tech words parents of tech-savvy kids should know
Every parent wants the opportunity to speak the language of their kids. For those of us who didn’t grow up with an Apple II, it may seem as though your tech-savvy kid is speaking a foreign language. However, it doesn’t have to be so difficult to understand what your kid is talking about. Below, we have put together a list of 26 common words that the parents of techie kids should know. Coding (...
Learning to code develops lifelong learners
For our parent’s and grandparent’s, there was a high level of comfort in developing a skillset and then monetizing it throughout your career. Whether that was working in a factory building automobiles or being an accountant, there was a reasonable chance that if you were good at your job, your employment was guaranteed for life. Not only that, but the confidence employer’s had in the rate of ch...
3 Reasons Why Every Kid Should Go PRO in Coding
Whether it is baseball, basketball, football, tennis, golf or swimming, nearly every kid plays sports at some point during their childhood. Besides the obvious health benefits, there are some who start early and are able to progress all the way to the collegiate level. For the exceptional, a professional career is the ultimate goal. And what parent doesn’t want their child to reach the peak of...
10 Great Hardware & Software Platforms for Teaching Kids Coding
At Digital Adventures, we’ve been fortunate to work with hundreds of students to build thousands of technology-based projects at our state-of-the-art learning studios. During that time, our instructional team has had the opportunity to pilot and ultimately incorporate numerous hardware and software platforms that are designed to teach kids coding.Many of the organizations that are highlighted b...
Introducing Brain Sports | Innovative New Approach to Teaching Kids To Code
Over the past several years, Digital Adventures has worked to develop an education technology platform designed for kids who we believe are the emerging technologists that focuses on teaching our students to build with technology independently so they could one day change the world with their innovations and inventions. While, we’ve had great success in terms of the number of students we’ve wor...
5 Important Criteria When Picking A Kids Coding Class
With Facebook and Instagram feeds filled with back to school pictures of the next generation of leaders, now is a great time to start thinking about after-school activities for the kids. At the top or near the top of the list should be computer coding or technology classes. Statistics published at code.org says that jobs are being created that require computer science or engineering degrees at ...
4 Reasons Why We Celebrate Epic Failures at Digital Adventures
Ask anyone who has done programming for a meaningful period of time and they will describe the pleasure and pain of building with technology. On the one hand, when they build a new website, mobile app or product feature; there is a sense of euphoria along with a tremendous sense of accomplishment that human has conquered machine. On the other hand, the effort required to push through epic inter...
5 Key Reasons Why We Love our Competitors
When we started Digital Adventures 3 years ago, we had a vision for how we would teach kids to build with technology so that they could one day change the world! Since, that time, we have built out a curriculum leveraging best-in-class hardware & software programs, launched purposely-designed learning studios, hired engaging instructors, built a data-driven back-end technology platform focu...