Some basic (very basic) Pokemon Go tactics: Buddy system Most efficient approach to hearts for Buddies: Only feed buddies berries once per day Start with play (rub the head of the Pokemon, for some like Regigas without any obvious head then torso). Then take photo Then feed berries Then engage in battle with: Team Go ... Read more
Candyland is a simple board game designed for 2-4 players ages 3+. It is a simple and quick game governed completely by luck, there is no skill involved. Candyland is a race game whose goal is to get from the starting to the finish line first. The game was first designed in 1949, and has ... Read more
Fluency and automaticity Building fluency in math and language is significantly (though not exclusively) building automaticity in recognizing and recalling math facts, and the sounds, spelling, and meaning of words, respectively. Foundationally, building automaticity must in fact be based on tasks which do so. This seems obvious but isn't so, as an incisive article reveals: ... Read more
Science of Math has taken cues from the Science of Reading. Though it is seen as lagging by a few years, there is already a solid body of research regarding how children learn math and how to best teach it. As with the Science of Reading, the focus is on proven explicit, direct, systematic instruction, ... Read more
Learning Piano app (Simply Piano) My seven year old started to learn the piano at age 6, at first it was messing around with an app (Simply Piano), though he committed to 15 minutes per day. We did that for about six months, but using an app has many drawbacks. My children like this, but ... Read more
Reasons for homeschooling Homeschooling is a way for parents to take on the primary responsibility for educating their children. By primary I mean as the sole guiding source of instruction. While in many cases, state or third party curricula is used, as well as shared resources or even online courses and enrollment in distance education ... Read more
Kodable is a somewhat slow website (and iOS app, no Android) which teaches "coding" in a somewhat rudimentary way. It is engaging for the children (tested on ages 4 and 6) but limited in what it can teach. Navigation is problematic as there are two interfaces and so sending a task from the teacher/parent dashboard ... Read more
It turns out that there are many legitimate concerns when it comes to virtual reality and children, the ones that are different than the concerns with video games (addiction, etc.), are around how the eyes focus (or not) in virtual reality as opposed to reality. Currently, one could say that all virtual reality devices and ... Read more
Homo Ludens is a book by published in 1938 by Johan Huizinga. It is meant to explain The Play Element of Culture(not just children's play). Homo Ludens is an important part of game studies. As such it is a great place to start out when designing course for children, even very young children. They are ... Read more
If an artificial intelligence is meant to be thinking and feeling, then it makes sense to understand it as a social being, one which learns in a community of learners, teachers, and others. This might seem obvious. Just as a human being can become human insofar as they are embedded in a community and human ... Read more
Written American English Standard English is most related to written form and is standardized for a given English-speaking country. Therefore, Standard American English is the standardized form of English in the United States. Spoken American English General American English is the more or less standardized or common spoken American English. Written Standard American English and ... Read more
Learning second, foreign, or other language as adult is not uncomplicated. First, we need to review what we actually know about learning languages, and learning them as an adult (as there is a significant difference between how children and adults learn languages). What we don't know about l;earning a language First off, we need to ... Read more
When one wants to understand what the most sigificant digits are regarding courses of action, it is vital to have the appropriate time-scale. What can be done in 1 day is a much more constrained problem than one can be done in 1 year, 10 years, 1,000 years, etc. Ten million years is sufficiently large ... Read more
Our three-year-old wasn't pooping regularly, which caused a lot of concern. Eventually we were going to go to the hospital for a thorough set of tests and what not, after about 4 months of once-per-week pooping. There are many potential causes and this behavior is not uncommon in 2-6 year olds. Possible things to try: ... Read more
The original formulation of Zipf's law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there is some ... Read more
The thing about history is that there is a lot of it. And prehistory, well, so much more. The highlights: carbon/methane sequestration 50mya seas and temperatures Return of the wooly mammoth Arctic resources Emigration for the next 1,000 years O Canada Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) > At least since 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has ... Read more
Shichida, Heguru and other so-called "right-brain" learning methods, to put it plainly, have no evidence for their efficacy, and in large part the theoretical statements they make about how the brain and learning works are largely discredited by current learning and brain development research. These kinds of so-called "schools" should be considered scams for the ... Read more
Update added the Time Horizon timeline which includes events at various time bands. Regular readers of this blog know that I intermittently opine on what are appropriate time horizons. This it seems is an underlying feature of many failures and successes in many areas of human behavior. Allow me to present some recent thoughts and ... Read more