Check the best way to teach kids about computer (video)

Computer code is the next universal language, and its syntax will be limited only by the imaginations of the next generation of programmers. The problem with that idea is that coding education is failing to fire imaginations on a big enough scale.

Linda Liukas is helping to educate problem-solving kids, encouraging them to see computers not as mechanical, boring and complicated but as colorful, expressive machines meant to be tinkered with. In that way, she is teaching them that coding is not an end in itself, but it is a means by which people can express their creativity.

In this Ted talk, she invites us to imagine a world where the Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow grow up to be optimistic and brave about technology and use it to create a new world that is wonderful, whimsical and a tiny bit weird.

USEFUL TIPS: See Why handwriting helps you learn

Why handwriting helps you learn

Over the past decade or so, there’s been a fair amount of discussion relating to the impact that our omnipresent technology has on handwriting. Cursive handwriting is no longer a mainstay of elementary education as it once was, usurped by typing on laptops and tablets. Teachers with many subjects to teach and time in short supply often leave behind these handwriting techniques in favor of methods that will serve their students better as they move into a global, technology-based world.

Though grandparents may consider their grandkids’ writing to be horrific chicken scratch (even if they’re communicating via email more and more these days, too), there may good reason to keep teaching handwriting. More than keeping with tradition, studies have shown that handwriting stimulates the brain in ways that typing does not, helping make connections and learn new things, and effectively making you smarter.