We all know the old saying “you don’t really know unless you see it for yourself” right?  A collaboration between WATG and EON Reality Inc has resulted in an immersive experience one step short of teleportation. The iCube is composed of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.

How is this relevent to alternative education? Good question!  It is one thing to read about the renaissance period or landing on the moon in books but to actually partake in an experience, duping your brain into seeing you are actually there? That is another level of learning altogether.   With all the work that the Google Earth team has been doing in reconstructing 3D spaces, technically speaking, these types of educational experiences seem like they are just around the corner.  Unfortunately with a $600 000 price tag, it may be a moment yet before we see this type of set-up in your run of the mill classroom.  Could you imagine?  ”Children, take out your 3D goggles, today we are going on a fieldtrip”

Here is a bit of Seinfeld/SNL humor to end the ‘back to school’ week, have a great weekend!

Over here at Pop Lock and Learn we are in the early stages of writing another subject to add to  our collection of learning resources. In doing our preliminary research for the ‘Hip Hop World Geography’ edition, we came across a wonderful cartoon teaching kids the names of the states and their capitals.  We wanted to share with you, our audience, where we get our inspiration to do what we do.

As teaching professionals, we find that this type of media content is especially valuable for a 4-8 age demographic entering into primary schools, particularly the younger ones who are transitioning from learning through nursery rhymes into direct instruction from a teacher in school.  The great thing about these types of songs is if you play it enough times you will memorize without any effort.  Do you remember all the states and their capitals? Have a try for yourself…

Reading through my google reader today, I came across an article in the economist announcing a New York public school opening called  ’Quest to Learn.’   The publicly funded school  for students from grade 6 to 12 was established on the research principles of Dr James Paul Gee who is at the forefront of exploring ‘What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.’  We here at Pop Lock and Learn would like to commend and congratulate this new school on breaking ground in this emerging educational field and will keep an close eye on their efforts.  Below is an excerpt from the new schools website.

“Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core. It’s important to note that Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences. Games and other forms of digital media serve another useful purpose at Quest: they serve to model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.”

We took a bit of a summer vacation ourselves here at the Pop Lock and Learn Blog but things are back in that fall September swing.

With all the controversy this past week directed towards President Obama  over his back to school address to the children of America, we thought it would be great to be one of the first to post the video of his actual message.

We think its great to see President Obama acting like a true “Commander in Chief” by addressing another kind of “troops” with such a positive message.  The President asks the students to take personal responsibility for their actions, be realistic in setting goals and most importantly put the work in.

If you are having trouble  prying your child away from the computer to do their homework then we have just the site for you.  Under their ‘Education’ section Miniclip has put together a great set of fantastic online edutainment games to keep your childs brains nourished while they are having fun.

As education design becomes more complex and challenging, a new form of storytelling is required in delivering a new level of interactivity, integration and a more democratic relationship between storyteller and audience. Educators (facilitators) should draw from the games industry to add value to their knowledge development as a step to taking mathematics learning to its next stage of evolution.

Here is a link to a paper discussing the above topic, written and compiled the authors listed below…

Hanafizan Hussain is currently doing her PhD in E-Learning and her research area includes education and entertainment.

Zarina Che Embi is a tutor in the Faculty of Information Technology and also a Postgraduate student in Multimedia University. Her research area is edutainment in early childhood and kindergarten kids.

Samsuri Hashim is Executive Director for Era Net Advertising & Publication. His research areas are multimedia application and entertainment.

1. Does your child say he or she hates school?
If so, something is probably wrong with the school because children are natural learners. When they’re young you can hardly stop them from learning. If your children say they hate school, listen to them.

2. Does your child find it difficult to look an adult in the eye, or to interact with children younger or older than they are?
If so, your child may have become “socialized” to that very narrow group which many children ordinarily interact with in most schools, and may be losing the ability to communicate with a broader group of children and adults.

3. Does your child seem fixated on designer labels and trendy clothes for school?
This is a symptom of the shallowness of the traditional schools’ approach, causing children to rely on external means of comparison and acceptance, rather than deeper values.

4. Does your child come from school tired and cranky?
This is a sure sign that their educational experiences are not energizing but are actually debilitating.

5. Do your children come home complaining about conflicts that they’ve had in school and unfair situations that they have been exposed to?
This is a sign that your school does not have a proper process for conflict resolution and communication.

6. Has your child lost interest in creative expression through art, music, and dance?
These things are generally not encouraged in the traditional system today and are not highly valued. They’re considered secondary to the “academic” areas. In some cases, courses are not even offered in these areas any more. This tends to extinguish these natural talents and abilities in children.

7. Has your child stopped reading for fun, or reading or writing for pleasure? Are your children doing just the minimum for homework and going off for some escapist activity?
This is a sign that these spontaneous activities are not being valued in their school and another sign that they are losing their creativity.

8. Does your child procrastinate until the last minute to do homework?
This is a sign that the homework is not very interesting to, is not really meeting his or her needs, and is tending to extinguish their natural curiosity.

9. Does your child come home talking about anything exciting that happened in school that day?
If not, maybe nothing exciting is happening for your child in school. Would you want to keep working if your job was like that?

10. Did the school nurse of guidance counselor suggest that your child has some strange three lettered disease, like ADD, and that they should now be given Ritalin or some other drug?
I suggest that it is more probable that the school has the disease, EDD–Educational Deficit Disorder, and time to get your child out of that situation!

here is the link to the entire article by Jerry Mintz via The Education Revolution website

Oliver Knill over in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University has been compiling a collection of movie clips where math has been referenced.

This reminded us over at Pop Lock and Learn of one of our favourite Walt Disney short films ‘Donald In Mathmagic Land.’ This was made in 1959, proving that ‘Edutainment‘ is not a new concept at all.

Enjoy!

A very interesting link showed up in Pop Lock and Learn’s inbox today leading to an article discussing  research that has been conducted on how between childhood and adulthood neural map of the brain rearranges to conceptualize arithmetic. We have long been intrigued by the subject of brain development and all the activity that takes place when the stimuli of mathematics is introduced to a child’s mind. This indeed is one of the big reasons our debut release was “The Hip Hop Times Tables.”

Addition and subtraction are simple enough concepts for everyone to grasp, but when multiplication is introduced,  a new layer of complexity is brought  into a child’s thinking process. A child can easily lose touch with mathematics if this new layer of complexity is introduced and not understood completely. The instant they lose touch with multiplication, and henceforth math, they do not allow themselves from that moment on to consider taking a careers as an engineer, scientist or exploring outer space as an astronaut.   Parents and teachers need to take note and remember multiplication to be a very early milestone in a child’s educational development. It’s incredible how relatable it can be to the education and career choices they make later in life.

Here is a link to this fascinating article