DrTechniko

Train Young Innovators Anywhere Anytime

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Story 5 – Author’s Discussion

This may be the most rude story I’ve ever written, but I had fun doing it, because it illustrates one of my strongest beliefs: “give kids the tools to innovate and don’t limit them”.

Originally I wanted to write a story to teach kids how to draw the different shapes, but I found too many stories and e-books about that subject online. I thought it would be better to write a story about imagination, creativity and innovation and how sometimes we stifle it when we teach our kids in school.

Our hero goes above and beyond and turns squares and circles into works of art. But, no matter how creative our hero gets, the Rude Rollerball Pen will find a way to either take credit or belittle our hero. Our hero is patient until she has had enough and so she drains the Rude Rollerball Pen and all of its suppression.

The lesson here is simple: push your kids to innovate, and if anyone tells them they can’t do it, teach them to have the strength to set these rude repressors aside.

 

I hope we learned something useful today,

DrTechniko

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Online schooling: Should we offer it to children?

Last week I finished an online digital painting class at schoolism.com taught by the legendary Bobby Chiu. To show you how effective the class was, I learned how to turn this:

Into this:

And then into this!


All from the comfort of my home and time schedule using only Photoshop and a digital tablet.

I’m not a professional illustrator (yet), but I feel like I learned some amazing skills from a world expert on the subject and I felt like a kid having fun. So, I wondered “Could kids benefit from online schooling?”

So I thought of some benefits and drawbacks of online schooling compared to traditional schools:

Benefits:

(The online schools I include above do not target children per se, but I don’t see why their models couldn’t be adapted for children.)

Drawbacks:

  • Schools are not just about knowledge transfer, they ‘re also about making friends and getting exposed to the real world away from home.
  • It’s hard to enforce the “rules” when the teacher is not physically around.

As far as “enforcing rules”, a “virtual teacher” technology can easily be applied to record scores and progress as if the teacher was around (with deadlines, online testing etc.). So the most serious drawback of online schooling is the lack of the ability to socialize. Even though there are options that mimic social interaction online a la Facebook (schoology.com), unless kids leave home and meet other kids in person, they will miss out on a big part of life lessons if we replace schools with online learning.

So how about turning schools into “social activity centers” to get kids to play and interact together while they get schooled online? For the first time in history, we could give kids the opportunity (especially in developing countries) to get quality education from anywhere anytime at the fraction of the cost of traditional schools.

What do you think?

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StoRy 4 – Discussion

Many times I’ve heard people ask first graders “what is your favorite class in school”. The child is forced to choose one subject: sports, math, language etc. That trend continues throughout school and students tend to become one-dimensional. Too much focus too early ends up hurting our problem solving skills, because we lose the opportunity to build extra thinking tools and models that can be composed together.

StoRy 4 illustrates that taking a step back, thinking outside the box and composing abilities can solve a problem even if it appears to be unsolvable. Not until the Number 4 and the Letter R realize they can combine their spelling and counting abilities can they figure out that R is the fourth letter in the word FOUR.

The story also introduces the array, a data structure that appears everywhere in science (especially in computer science). An array, is basically a list of items that can be identified by an index/position. In our story, the array is an array of characters (F-O-U-R), also known as a word.

Here are some comprehension questions you can ask your children:

Q: What is the 4th letter of the word LETTER? What’s the position of the letter B in the word NUMBER?
A: T. 4.

Q: What’s more useful: Counting or Spelling?
A: Both are equally useful.

Q: Why was the Number 4 smiling at the end?
A: Because at the end, FOUR had 4 boxes and R only 1 inside the crossword puzzle. Moreover, it was all because the Letter R jumped into the box thinking that this would make it win the argument against the Number 4. If the Letter R hadn’t jumped into the box, then the Number 4 would not appear in the crossword puzzle at all.

I hope we learned something useful today,
Dr. Techniko

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Story 3 – Discussion (part 2)

The second part of Story 3 explores more aspects of the DNA molecule both when used as a message and when used to create new organisms. Also, we take a look into biological processes that are defined in terms of positive and negative feedback loops.Here are some questions you might want to discuss with your kids:

Q: What happens when we change a sequence in the DNA or we start messing with the DNA strand and we cut and paste pieces from other DNA strands into it?
A: We get an engineered DNA strand that may or may not exist in nature. The change can be as small as changing the color of your hair or as big as transforming you into a new type of organism altogether, like a mutant.

Q: What do you think is Daena’s best quality that makes her a great DNA detective?
A: First, she knows her biology. Second, she is inventive and tries to find solutions based on her knowledge. Third, her solutions are not complicated. They are simple and they work.

Q: How did Daena beat the Ugga Ugga virus at the end?
A: First she changed the DNA of the Ugga Ugga virus to create a stronger (and not evil) virus, the Gaga Gaga virus, and then used the Gaga Gaga virus to kill the Ugga Ugga virus by creating a negative-positive feedback loop.

Q: How does a negative feedback loop work? Can you show an example of a negative feedback loop at your home?
A: A negative feedback loop works by regulating the amount of something. The more of the “something” we have, the feedback loop will try to make this “something” less. The less of the “something” we have, the feedback loop will try to make this “something” more.
This is for example how we maintain temperature in a house using a thermostat. In this case the “something” is the “heat”. The more heat we have, the thermostat will tell the A/C to blow cool air into the house to bring down the heat.

I hope we learned something useful today,
Dr. Techniko

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Children’s Storytelling: Digital or Printed?

The last day of my children’s book writing class we did a show-and-tell of our favorite children’s books. Instead of bringing a book, I brought in an iPad and showed Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat In The Hat” app from Oceanhouse Media. The comments I got from my classmates (among them many parents and teachers) were mixed. Some liked the extra features of the app that can only be done in a digital medium. They liked for example that a kid could click on the fish on the screen and have the word “fish” pop up. Some disliked them. They found for example the voice of the actor/narrator unfit or distracting.

If one looks at the industry news for book publishing it is clear that digital publishing is making huge strides as e-readers improve. What should we expect digital storytelling to turn into in the future?

I believe with more experience, application developers will learn what works with kids and parents and what doesn’t. At the same time, we ‘ll also learn how to get the most out of digital storytelling, the same way we learned to get the most out of our books. Especially because I think the line between what is considered a digital book and a video game will be blurred.

I was fortunate enough to interview one of the entrepreneurs in digital storytelling, Andrew Gitt, the founder of storytimeforme.com about his vision on digital vs printed storytelling and what the advantages of each medium are for educating our children.

Andrew, tell us a bit about what your vision behind storytimeforme.com is and who your audience is.

You can check out our mission and target audience at http://storytimeforme.com/about-us.

What’s unique about your site is that even though you offer digital stories, you also do prints. What led you to the decision to do both?

We recently started the personalized activity book as we recognize teachers and parents are also looking for hands-on activities.  We started off just as an online library which we plan on expanding of course. We already have over 40 books complete which we’ll slowly be releasing.

How does your technology help children learn how to read?

A child is assisted by having the text highlighted as the story progresses. However, technology really serves our higher goal. Our motto is not to teach kids to read. Honestly, that’s not what we do. What we are trying to do is make reading fun and have the national average of 4 hours of TV be replaced by more
reading.

What would you like to see the future bring for digital storytelling?

I would like to have hundreds of books with many publishers and authors with a lot of variety and be a place where kids can ‘plop’ in a safe environment and read instead of watching TV.  That’s our goal at storytimeforme.com at least.  Also I would love to see stories offered into other languages. It’s one of our future goals as well.

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I’m curious to hear what you guys think. Here is a poll to pick your brains.

I hope we learned something useful today,

Dr. Techniko