This category features new ventures in the realms of schooling, lessons, teaching and general knowledge building. In particular these posts showcase startups helping everyone better themselves through knowledge transfer.
Hopscotch is an app built by those who want to create things that they themselves wished existed when they were kids. The free beta release of the app teaches kids aged 8-12 the beginnings of simple coding. The iPad app uses bright, fun and highly visual cues to keep interest to foster inheriting programming concepts. Instead of the boring line by line tutorials and creating a “Hello World” type of page, Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John (Hopscotch founders) are hoping boys and especially girls will join the forces of programming at a young age with a youthful focused approach to teaching.
Boys seem to gravitate toward coding much more easily then girls possibly because of their devotion to video games, while girls get to play with dolls and fashion essentials. With Hopscotch’s bright and colorful interface the app attracts girls to use their building blocks of learning, without it being overly feminine to turn boys away. The interactive program lets kids drag blocks of code into a scripting area to develop their own projects. The female programming movement has been amazing over the past year at the same time childhood learning of circuits and programming has also been a topic with much news. A movement that we hope continues and possibly one day the number of female programmers is equal to that of their gender counterpart.
Keeping track of your friends is pretty easy with all the social media options they have to share. Favorite moments are captured on Instagram, what their thinking is on Twitter, and everything else is on their Facebook pages. But what if they were featured in the NY Times? Unless they post the link boasting their acclaim the acknowledgment can get lost in the mass of information flooding our lives everyday.
Newsle tracks the “real news”. Link your account to Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and favorite writers or people you just want to be updated about. When they make the news, Newsle makes sure you know about it by focusing on “real news” and ignoring social noise. The news herder combs the web analyzing 1 million articles every day, discovering every major news article and blog post published online, as well as the most minor one. Their algorithm then determines if the article is talking about the person you want to know about and presents its findings.
We meet entrepreneurs of all kinds, some are tech geniuses but with no design background, others are business oriented but have no understanding of the intricacies of user experience and interfaces and vice versa. But let’s focus on the former – people can make software do almost anything if they understand how to code, but design can seem difficult, subjective, mis-conceived and inaccessible sometimes.
Hack Design compiles some of the world’s best designers to curate useful blogs, books, games, videos and tutorials that they used to help learn the essentials of great design. Integrated into smartly planned lesson plans, the intention is to provide hackers a new set of tools to add visual beauty to their own projects.
Were you part of team Berenstain or Paddington? That’s the decisions that plague children before they become tweenies and are force-fed the Twilight Saga. A team of five has founded a new startup to give kids the chance a new way to dig up and discover millions of book titles at their very own doorstep. Before they get too old and Amos & Boris aren’t “cool” anymore.
Mail A Tale is a monthly subscription of hand-curated children’s books delivered right to your door. For just $19.95 a month you can receive the basic package which includes 1 hardcover or 2 softcover books, or $39.95 for the book box plus that gives you 4 softcover or 2 hardcover books.
New York startup, Pave, yesterday launched their company to help aspiring young professionals overcome the challenges of just starting out. The idea keeps the passions within young Americans thriving, by helping them achieve their goals and being paired with resources. Prospects are matched with group of backers who provide funds to go after their dreams – instead of taking odd jobs to tackle student loan debts or becoming disgruntled with unemployment.
This isn’t just a charity handout given to the prospects, for accepting backing they become bound to pay back the backers through a percentage of their paychecks. But if the Prospect isn’t able to attain any income over the life of the contract, the backers get nothing. Which is what makes it different from a regular loan. However, the founders of Pave think that no money being earned by Prospects is very unlikely to happen due to screening processes and backers deciding on who to fund.
The My Food My Way project is all about actively engaging kids and emphasizing interactivity. We first shared with you this project when it was incepted back in July, and since then celebrated chef and restaurateur Susur Lee has come aboard in the Toronto Education Worker’s and the Toronto District School Board’s campaign to engage student on the subject of nutrition.
To reach out to students aged 13 – 17, My Food My Way launched a new web app that allows users to become interactive live puppets in the name of healthy eating and to record and share puppet video messages. John Weatherup, President of the Toronto Education Workers says “One of the ways that My Food My Way differs from other student nutritional campaigns is its philosophy to engage first, educate second.” And that’s what the puppet video messages, aptly called Foodagram, exactly does.
Earlier this year we shared with you Instamatch – the hit Instagram matching game that let you play with your own personal memories and the images created by others. But if you were looking for a tangible way to bring Instamatch home, Pinhole Press has introduced “Memory Game” to their catalogue of beautifully simple photo gifts.
You choose your 12 favorite photos (of anything: places, faces, friends, family, pets, etc.) Pinhole then prints the photos on thick cards with beautiful graphic backgrounds. Although not built with Instagram API, Pinhole makes artful pieces come to life as photo gifts. It would be great if someone like Printstagram opened their offering to add such artful and fun creations. Or hopefully Pinhole makes advances in their user experience to add Instagram functionality to their product creation designer.
There is an incredible force that comes from the simplest act of helping a stranger, in giving without expecting recognition. In your daily life, you may give a homeless person something extra they are in need of or you might do something as simple as opening the door for a fellow citizen – but when you perform these acts, rarely will you go around telling people what you have done. Rather you do it because it “just feels right.” There is something magical in the quality of giving anonymously that satisfies a basic need in all of us. This magic is what coWonder is all about.
As people we are a group who love challenges. Challenges are what make us who we are. coWonder is a new way to develop ideas, address challenges and collaborate to deal with the questions that we all face every day. Founded by Fermin Zelada, he says about coWonder:
EduConnect #ECTO is a video series and discussion on how technology effects education. On May 30th, 2012 The EduConnect Panel Discussion was held to share how technology is affecting teachers, students and school boards, while exploring how social media is being applied in the classroom along with what startups and entrepreneurs are building to solve problems in the education sector. If you weren’t able to attend the event, here’s a short glimpse on what was covered.
In this interview Karim Kanji meets with Maria Moriarty whom is the Information Resource Officer at AlphaPlus Centre. AlphaPlus is a provincially-funded organization in Ontario that provides expertise to support adult educators. AlphaPlus does this through disseminating research, information and training to adult educators on innovative learning technologies – what technologies to use, how to use them, and when to use them. Their work informs practitioners, literacy organizations and agencies on tools and best practices, which results in more effective training of adult learners.
