Helicopter Parenting Can Hinder Child Development

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PsychCentral – Rick Nauert PhD

New research suggests overparenting, known as helicopter parenting, may hinder a child’s development. Investigators found this can occur when parents become too obsessed with homework, particularly in middle school and high school.

Investigators from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) followed 866 parents from three Brisbane Catholic/independent schools.

They found those who endorse overparenting beliefs tend to take more responsibility for their child doing their homework and also expect their child’s teachers to take more responsibility for it.

“There is concern this greater parental involvement in ensuring homework is completed, particularly in high school, is actually impacting the child’s ability to take responsibility for their homework or understand the consequences of their actions,” said QUT Clinical Psychologist Dr. Judith Locke.

“The irony is a helicopter parenting style with the goal of fostering academic achievement could be undermining the development of independent and resilient performance in their children.

“Parental involvement is a child’s school experience is considered an important factor in their academic success and homework is a key aspect of that.

“However it seems some parents may take the notion too far and continue to assist children at an age the child should be taking most of the responsibility for their academic work, such as the senior school years.

“Parental assistance with homework should slowly reduce as a child gets older and daily parental involvement in an adolescent’s homework would be developmentally inappropriate.

“These parents appear to not only help their child more, they also expect their child’s teachers to help them more, particularly in the middle school and senior school years.

“We know from recent research, that there may be a point where parental assistance ceases to be beneficial, especially as children reach adolescence and young adulthood, and can result in poor resilience, entitlement, and reduced sense of responsibility.”

Dr. Locke said studies in America which reported on parental over-involvement in a student’s university life found it to be extremely detrimental.

“Some parents choose their adult child’s subjects, edit, or complete their assignments and badger lecturers to improve their child’s grades,” Dr Locke said.

“When these parents are making these decisions or providing academic pressure it has been found the adult student disengages from their education and often has increased depression and decreased satisfaction with life.

“The results of this study may go some way to explain why some parents are continuing to be highly involved in their adult child’s academic life.”

The study will be published by the Journal of Psychologists and Counsellors in Schools.

Researchers used the new Locke Parenting Scale (LPS) overparenting measure to quantify parenting involvement. Participating parents completed online questionnaires about their parenting beliefs and intentions, and their attitudes associated with their child’s homework.

“Parental help can be constructive by showing interest and coaching them to complete their work, but unconstructive assistance includes telling a child the right answer or taking over from them when they are completing school tasks,” Locke said.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Homework Is Wrecking Our Kids

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Salon – Heather Shumaker

Homework does have an impact on young students — but it’s not a good one

“There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students.”

This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you’re on. Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught? That millions of families go through a nightly ritual that doesn’t help? Homework is such an accepted practice, it’s hard for most adults to even question its value.

When you look at the facts, however, here’s what you find: Homework has benefits, but its benefits are age dependent.

For elementary-aged children, research suggests that studying in class gets superior learning results, while extra schoolwork at home is just . . . extra work. Even in middle school, the relationship between homework and academic success is minimal at best. By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit, but only in moderation. More than two hours per night is the limit. After that amount, the benefits taper off. “The research is very clear,” agrees Etta Kralovec, education professor at the University of Arizona. “There’s no benefit at the elementary school level.”

Before going further, let’s dispel the myth that these research results are due to a handful of poorly constructed studies. In fact, it’s the opposite. Cooper compiled 120 studies in 1989 and another 60 studies in 2006. This comprehensive analysis of multiple research studies found no evidence of academic benefit at the elementary level. It did, however, find a negative impact on children’s attitudes toward school.

This is what’s worrying. Homework does have an impact on young students, but it’s not a good one. A child just beginning school deserves the chance to develop a love of learning. Instead, homework at a young age causes many kids to turn against school, future homework and academic learning. And it’s a long road. A child in kindergarten is facing 13 years of homework ahead of her.

Then there’s the damage to personal relationships. In thousands of homes across the country, families battle over homework nightly. Parents nag and cajole. Overtired children protest and cry. Instead of connecting and supporting each other at the end of the day, too many families find themselves locked in the “did you do your homework?” cycle.

When homework comes prematurely, it’s hard for children to cope with assignments independently—they need adult help to remember assignments and figure out how to do the work. Kids slide into the habit of relying on adults to help with homework or, in many cases, do their homework. Parents often assume the role of Homework Patrol Cop. Being chief nag is a nasty, unwanted job, but this role frequently lingers through the high school years. Besides the constant conflict, having a Homework Patrol Cop in the house undermines one of the purported purposes of homework: responsibility.

Homework supporters say homework teaches responsibility, reinforces lessons taught in school, and creates a home-school link with parents. However, involved parents can see what’s coming home in a child’s backpack and initiate sharing about school work–they don’t need to monitor their child’s progress with assigned homework. Responsibility is taught daily in multiple ways; that’s what pets and chores are for. It takes responsibility for a 6-year-old to remember to bring her hat and lunchbox home. It takes responsibility for an 8-year-old to get dressed, make his bed and get out the door every morning. As for reinforcement, that’s an important factor, but it’s only one factor in learning. Non-academic priorities (good sleep, family relationships and active playtime) are vital for balance and well-being. They also directly impact a child’s memory, focus, behavior and learning potential. Elementary lessons are reinforced every day in school. After-school time is precious for the rest of the child.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

‘Metric Parenting’ Might Be Good for Some Parents—But Is It Always Good for Kids?

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Slate – Elissa Strauss

In her 2014 book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, journalist Brigid Schulte examines our culture of busyness and what should be done about it. In addition to recommending institutional changes like more generous leave policies and more flexible work schedules, Schulte says that women in particular would benefit from changing the way they experience their life outside of work. Citing the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, she argues that women’s downtime is often “contaminated” by “keeping in mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands, and family calendar.”

In a recent post for Fast Company, journalist Reva Seth offers up a paradoxical remedy for parent’s contaminated non-working life: treat it more like work. Calling this strategy “metric parenting,” Seth explains that we should consider “using the same tactics to meet goals and deadlines at work in order to get more of what you want in your family life.”

Seth says that while interviewing more than 500 parents for her book The MomShift: Women Share Their Stories of Career Success After Having Children, she noticed that a number of parents were setting defined parenting goals for themselves and regularly tracking their progress toward meeting these goals. Over the five years in which she followed her interview group, these “metric parenters” reported feeling happier with the ways they were balancing family life and work than those who took less systematic approaches. Seth offers parents four tips on how to best succeed at “metric parenting”: define your goals, break them down into actions, record your progress, and celebrate your accomplishments. “Instead of feeling guilty, you may find yourself feeling accomplished. And you’ll have the metrics to back it up,” Seth writes.

For the growing number of people who will never pass up an opportunity for self-quantification, this manageable approach to parenting might very well be useful. Child-rearing and work both require an ability to focus and follow through; if someone’s figured out ways to improve those skills at work, why not go ahead and try them out with their kids? In Overwhelmed, Schulte recommends battling an abiding sense of busyness by organizing one’s time into chunks dedicated to one purpose.Now I am pushing my son on the swing. Now I am slicing carrots. Seth’s approach is similar, except she asks parents not just to be aware of what they are doing in the moment, but also to set an intention and observe whether they are following through with it.

This approach might be good for some parents, but I don’t think it benefits kids in all cases. Children are fluid, ever-shifting creatures; their needs change rapidly and forcefully, and what makes you a good parent one day won’t necessarily be helpful the next. Of course there are some habits, like limiting screen time, that are generally good for families, no matter their current disposition. Still, when a parent’s too preoccupied with doing and measuring whatever they decided they should be doing more of, they might easily miss what it is their children need.

Maybe mom decides she should go on more class trips, but what her daughter could really use is a day playing hooky and going to the movies and the nail salon. Or—back to the too easily maligned gadgets—there might be an evening when dad insists on putting his phone down (all part of his master plan), but his tween son wants to do is pick his up. Maybe he’s just made a new friend and they are debating Beatles albums on the latest hologram chatting service. Or maybe he’s just had a hard day and is in desperate need of 20 minutes of internet browsing-induced mindlessness.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Don’t Post About Me On Social Media, Children Say

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The New York Time – KJ Dell’Antonia

Recently, university researchers asked children and parents to describe the rules they thought families should follow related to technology.

In most cases, parents and children agreed — don’t text and drive; don’t be online when someone wants to talk to you. But there was one surprising rule that the children wanted that their parents mentioned far less often: Don’t post anything about me on social media without asking me.

As in, no pictures of them asleep in the back of the car. No posts about their frustration with their homework. That victory picture after the soccer game? Maybe. The frustrated rant about the fight you just had over laundry? No way.

The answers revealed “a really interesting disconnect,” said Alexis Hiniker, a graduate student in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who led the research. She, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, studied 249 parent-child pairs distributed across 40 states and found that while children ages 10 to 17 “were really concerned” about the ways parents shared their children’s lives online, their parents were far less worried. About three times more children than parents thought there should be rules about what parents shared on social media.

Sites like Facebook and Instagram are now baked into the world of today’s families. Many, if not most, new parents post images of their newborn online within an hour of birth, and some parents create social media accounts for the children themselves — often to share photos and news with family, although occasionally in the pursuit of “Instafame” for their fashionably clad, beautifully photographed sons and daughters.

With the first babies of Facebook (which started in 2004) not yet in their teens and the stylish kids of Instagram (which started in 2010) barely in elementary school, families are just beginning to explore the question of how children feel about the digital record of their earliest years. But as this study, although small, suggests, it’s increasingly clear that our children will grow into teenagers and adults who want to control their digital identities.

“As these children come of age, they’re going to be seeing the digital footprint left in their childhood’s wake,” said Stacey Steinberg, a legal skills professor and associate director of the Center on Children and Families at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “While most of them will be fine, some might take issue with it.”

Some children and teenagers question both past and present sharing. “I really don’t like it when my parents post pictures of me on their social media accounts, especially after finding out that some of my friends follow them,” said Maisy Hoffman, 14, an eighth grader who lives in Manhattan. “I worry more about my dad. He doesn’t always ask if he can post things, so I immediately turn away and ask if he’s going to post it. Or I’ll find out later because my friend saw something of me on his Instagram and I’ll have to ask him to take it down.”

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

How To Use Minecraft in a Science Lesson

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EdTech 4 Beginners – Neil Jarrett

Minecraft is an incredibly popular game for both children and adults. It can be used on a PC or there is also a pocket version App on both the App store and Google Play. The premise of the game is to ‘craft’ things and make your own world.

Although it is often viewed as ‘just a game’ it actually has many educational uses. My students really like Minecraft, so why not engage them in learning through it?

In Science our class topic is circuits. When revising series and parallel circuits, one of my students commented that he could do this on Minecraft. I challenged the class to have a go. Watch the video below for how they got on:

After the class had done the Minecraft challenge, they created the ‘real’ circuit:

How do you create a circuit in Minecraft?

First place a ‘Redstone Lamp’ on the ground (this is the light bulb). Then use ‘Redstone Dirt’ as wire and connect the lamp to a ‘Lever’ (this is a switch). It’s as simple as that.

Is Minecraft scientifically accurate?

The answer is no. If you break the wire on one side, the current still can reach the lamp on the other side. However this was a great talking point for my students: they loved the fact they spotted that Minecraft was ‘wrong’.

However, it is possible to make a series circuit on Minecraft scientifically accurate. An expert in my class showed everyone how you could do it. He wrote this on the board and the students copied on their iPads:

This experience has really opened my eyes to how much logic and problem-solving is involved in the game.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

AltSchool Wants To Iterate On Your Kid’s Education

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Fortune – Adam Lashinsky

A version of this post titled “AltSchool’s education experiment” originally appeared in Data Sheet,Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.

Last week I visited AltSchool, the San Francisco-based education-technology firm that has begun its corporate life by operating a small number of private “micro-schools.” AltSchool’s CEO, Google GOOG 1.07% veteran Max Ventilla, explained why his toddler of a startup—it began in 2013—began with baby steps. Other “ed-tech” companies have tried building broadly applicable technologies to achieve incremental growth. Almost all have failed. By beginning with small schools, Ventilla said, AltSchool can aim revolutionarily for the middle ground of teacher autonomy and accountability.

In other words, it can experiment. “We’re kind of flying the plane while we’re building it,” Ventilla said. This is a tried and true cliché of Silicon Valley product development. The old way, think Microsoft MSFT 1.42% , was to tinker for years on complicated software and then ship it at once. The new way, think Facebook FB 1.33% , is to iterate and then ship frequently.

The difference is that AltSchool is experimenting with the lives of children, not a better way of tagging beer-bust photos. The reason the plane-flying analogy amuses is that no one in their right mind would tinker with an airborne plane. Yet AltSchool asks parents to pay for the privilege of supplying their children as guinea pigs.

Some of what it is doing is fascinating. AltSchool has raised $133 million, and it has developed unique technology that borrows from current tech-industry memes. A student “playlist” shows all the topics and tasks accomplished. This not only allows a teacher to focus on unknown areas but also, cleverly, avoids wasting a child’s time rehashing completed material. A “parent portal” provides a stream like Facebook’s News Feed to keep parents up to speed on their child’s progress.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Should You Post About Your Kids on the Internet?

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The Huffington Post – Laurie Hollman, Ph.D.

When your kid gets under your skin or make you feel really proud, should you be writing about it on the internet?

Do our kids have a say in how we expose them to the world? Even the cutest baby picture, who’s to say in ten or 20 years that that child will be glad you exposed him of her to the world in a diaper?

Have you asked your child what they think now? Can they foresee the future?

Kids who say, “NO” they don’t want their picture seen kind of make it easy. We can listen to them. But it’s the kids who say “Yes” that worry me because do they really know what they are saying “yes” to?

Then beyond the pictures are our frustrations with our kids that we air looking for advice or their accomplishments that we brag about. Who’s to say we have the right to do this?

Our kids aren’t our property to discuss to anyone who happens to view our blog. Right? What’s your opinion?

Am I making too much of this or too little?

I’ve listed some pros and cons but this is a post I really need comments about.

Pros

1. I love my child, so I want to spread that love and share it. I want to shout it from the roof tops.

2. I want my friends and family and other well-wishers to enjoy each milestone, in fact each second of my kids development.

3. I like to laugh about my kids antics and let others enjoy them, too.

4. I want others to know my kids are normal just like theirs and do all kinds of funny and even raucous things to know what we all are going through.

5. I want to know what’s the norm for different ages. By posting what my child is doing and getting feedback I have a kind of measure of how my child is measuring up.

6. I want advice from people that will help me improve my parenting, so if they see what my kids are up to, they can guide me.

7. When I get frustrated, I need an outlet. Writing about what’s going on relieves the stress and pressure and then I handle things more calmly.

8. When my child is doing something off the mark and I think it’s funny., maybe it’s not ,and I need someone to tell me to take a second look and do something about it.

9. I’ll admit I feel somewhat competitive with other mothers and when my child does something to be proud of I want the world to know and see me in a positive light as a reflection of my child.

10. I’m an honest, take it as it comes mother who doesn’t take my kids strengths and weaknesses too seriously. I just like to share them to have the comfort of online friends who like to be friendly and keep up with my life.

Cons

1. I don’t want to embarrass my child when they are tots or teens or even in college. If I’m going to post a picture or something about them, I need their permission.

2. If they are too young to know what they are permitting, then they’re too young to post about.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Six Steps to Curb Materialism in Your Kids

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The New York Times – Ron Lieber

Children are ever-changing beings, but when it comes to money and materialism, too many parents think that their older offspring are not malleable at all.

So a few years back, a couple of parents who happen to be two of the nation’s leading experts on these topics got curious about whether an intervention that focused on money and materialism might turn children ages 10 to 17 around. They devised a sort of financial de-lousing process and set up an experiment to see if it would work.

One protagonist in this story is Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College and the author of “The High Price of Materialism.” His work over the years has helped cement, via social science, the gut feelings many of us have about the negative effects of covetousness on our psychological well-being.

The other main character is Nathan Dungan, who runs a financial consulting and education firm called Share Save Spend for families and others who want to get smarter about money conversations. I’ve met them both over the years and model some of my own parenting after the way they raise their own children.

Along with a handful of colleagues, the pair found a group of 71 families in which the children scored high (that is, badly) on a series of materialism tests. Half of them got no treatment at all, so they served as a randomly assigned control group. Mr. Dungan put the rest of the children through a series of drills, over several sessions, that included allowance tracking, a focus on giving, and ongoing family conversations about the connection between money and values.

The intervention worked. By the end of the eight-week process, the children who passed through the program saw their materialism scores decrease and also saw marked increases in self esteem. Moreover, the effects were lasting; eight months later, the changes were sticking. Instagram envy and the like had not marred their psyches permanently.

Key to the findings, however, was the fact that out in the real world, parents would have to lead the process themselves, since Mr. Dungan could not come and sit at the head of their dinner tables. Six steps appear to be essential for any parent who wants to try to replicate the process at home.

The first one is foundational: A regular allowance and a place to put it. The amount of the allowance doesn’t matter so much, as it will depend on what expenses you’re asking a child to pay for. As to where to put it, a few jars are fine, or you can use apps to track it electronically. What’s critical is dividing the money into three categories: spending, saving and giving. This, after all, is how most grownups begin to sort their financial lives, so it makes sense to set kids up this way.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Can Anonymous Apps Ever Be Safe For Kids?

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The Guardian – Nicole Kobie

Questions over whether the benefits of anonymous apps – such as giving children a space to explore sensitive issues – can outweigh the risks they pose

Nicole Madison Lovell, a 13-year-old school girl from Virginia, chatted with an 18-year-old man over anonymous messaging app Kik before he allegedly killed her in January. Since then the app – which boasts some 240 million registered users and requires no phone number or name – has been the subject of scrutiny.

In response, Kik has handed over data to the murder investigation, updated its guide for parents, and asked the Apple Store to boost its age rating from nine to 12, with company representatives stressing teens between 13 and 18 should get parental permission to install the app.

Kik is, of course, not the only anonymous app hit with safety scares. Yik Yak, which allows people within a particular radius to create posts anonymously and upvote or downvote other posts, has faced controversy for hosting racial abuse and violent threats. Secret, an app where users can share their secrets anonymously, has also faced scrutiny over cyberbullying and security.

These might be more extreme cases, but can these anonymous apps ever be truly safe?

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Minecraft Gaming In Theaters Near You!

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CBS Los Angeles

Young gamers across the country have been packing movie theaters as part of a tournament with some big bucks at stake.

“It’s just amazing that I can finally … there’s a league for doing something that I like cause I don’t like sports. There’s a league for that,” said Max Cummins, 11, who isn’t interested in traditional sports.

Known as Max5267, the fifth grader is part of Super League Gaming, which is basically a video game little league.

For four weeks, kids ages 6 to 14, crowd a movie theater and play Minecraft on the big screen. They’re divided into teams and play against one another as well as leagues across the U.S. and Canada.

Their parents are in the audience cheering them on just as they would in the stands.

Max says it’s no different than playing soccer or football.

“They do it ’cause they enjoy it. It’s their passion and that’s exactly how I feel about Minecraft,” he said.

Minecraft is one of the world’s most popular video games. It’s basically a digital version of LEGOs.

The creators of Super League Gaming say this isn’t mindless entertainment. President and COO Brett Morris says Minecraft may not be physical, but it is educational.

“It helps out with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math education] skills,” Morris said, adding that the game also helps with social skills, critical thinking, and creativity.

“If anything, maybe more here with our events with Minecraft than some traditional after school activities,” he said.

Bruce Brownstein, Max’s dad, says it also gets his son out of his bedroom and into a social setting.

“This is great that he gets out and he meets other people with similar interests because he’s never liked team sports for various reasons and this he likes,” Brownstein said.

Indigo Carey likes it too. She’s 9.

“Everybody says that video games are meant to be for boys but also girls can do it,” she said.

Tara Carey, her mom, says her three kids play sports as well but she wanted them to learn how to code, something many of these Minecraft gamers are already doing.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Check Out Sony’s Answer To LEGO Mindstorms

The Stress of Modern Parenting

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Quiet Revolution – Arnie Kozak

My experience growing up highlights the value of benign neglect. I had ample time alone to roam the woods around my neighborhood, ride my bike, and just goof off. As an introvert, I kept my social group small, and I often spent large chunks of time in solitude. My parents weren’t negligent, but neither were they overly involved in every single aspect of my life. They had their own interests to pursue and didn’t feel guilty about doing so.

You won’t hear about it on the evening news, and you may not even realize how it may be affecting you, but we are in the midst of a solitude crisis. Simply put, the lack of time, ability, or permission to be alone is a silent source of stress, undiscussed yet pervasive. It is caused, in large measure, by the busyness of daily life. Contemporary demands, especially for parents of young children, are unsustainable.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to assume that mothers who work more hours today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home moms in the 1960s, this is indeed the case, especially when the time spent “teaching and playing” is considered. According to a study by Liana Sayer and her colleagues, in 1965, mothers spent 36 minutes per day actively engaged in teaching and playing with their kids. In 1998, that number had swelled to 129 minutes.

And 1998 fathers were spending more time caring for and having fun with their kids than 1965 fathers, reflecting a cultural shift towards “involved fathering.” Contemporary fathers are also doing more primary child care than their early compatriots. However, while fathers are having more time with their kids than they did in the past, they are still not doing as much as mothers (for example, 1998 married moms spent 99 minutes per day in child care versus 51 minutes for dads).

I see these study results in my own psychotherapy practice. Many of the parents I work with have no time to themselves and no energy for self-care. Almost all of their spare moments, it seems, are spent driving their kids to soccer or hockey practices and tournaments and other activities. These parents don’t have the room to pursue their hobbies or to practice adequate self-care through exercise, rest, and meditation.

The trap of this parenting style is so much part of the fabric of the culture that it has become the norm. Writers like Polly Young-Eisendrath in her book The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance have started to question these norms. She says that contemporary parents subscribe to “I’m Okay—You’re Okay” parenting styles, such as helicopter parenting, which have “in common the belief that parents and children are on nearly equal footing when it comes to rights and needs, that parents should be friends with their children, and that children’s self-esteem must be promoted and protected at all costs.” Often that cost is parents’ solitude. Of course, you want your kids to be successful—but many parents believe that they have to do as much for their kids as possible even if it means sacrificing their own self-care. Ultimately, this is self-defeating.

Recent research by Melissa Milkie, Kei Nomaguchi, and Kathleen Denny indicates that our increased parental involvement—what they call an “ideology of intensive mothering”—isn’t helping our kids. The study found that for kids between the ages of 3 and 11, there was no correlation between parental engagement and the measured outcomes of behavioral or emotional problems, or math and reading scores. For older teens, more engagement was helpful in averting delinquency. But for mothers of younger children, the study results suggest “that mothers ease up on practicing more intensive mothering during childhood, especially given that it may end up exhausting them.”

Given that the cultural norm of intensive involvement is draining parents and not even helpful to the kids, perhaps there is another way to proceed. The pursuit of solitude doesn’t have to be absolute. You don’t have to sequester yourself within a mountaintop cave to get the rest you require. Brief periods of quiet, when you don’t have to answer to anyone else’s needs, can replenish your energy.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Check Out LittleBits’ #InventForGood Challenge!

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By Littlebits

You know you’ve had it. The moment when an object breaks or doesn’t do what you want it to and you think to yourself, “I could make this better for myself….or the world! (cue ominous laughter).” But no, really: you can.

In this month’s challenge, we want you to invent a product that makes a difference in someone else’s life then film a video telling us why it makes a difference. It can help a friend learn morse code or shield them from audio pollution. You can design a memory alarm for medication (or ramen) or a bionic arm.

To complete this mission, you will be taking on the role of product designer. You can think of product designers as the invisible hands that help shape our lives. Here’s an example: Pick up your phone or stand up and examine your chair. How do you hold it or sit in it? Do you enjoy using it? Is it uncomfortable? How could you make it better?

These are the questions product designers ask themselves regularly as professional problem solvers. They often follow a design process in their work: brainstorm and create, play and test to determine what works, remix to find better solutions, then share it with the world. We call this the Invention Cycle and it’s a great way to get started on this challenge!

PRIZES
Their will be three winners who will be selected by an esteemed panel of judges. They will receive a power-packed combo of Bits and status: a kit of their choice up to $200, a featured post in our Inventor Spotlight, and the opportunity to judge or help create future design challenges. Multiple entries are encouraged.

HOW IT WORKS
We recommend using the Invention Cycle to complete this challenge. Don’t forget to check out our Pro Tips as well!

1. CREATE. Start by thinking about where there are frustrations or difficulties in someone’s life. Look through your Bits and materials to see how they can help. Come up with a list of ideas for a product, select the issue you want to work on, and make a prototype. Next, sketch out ideas, then pick your favorite, and create a prototype.
2. PLAY. Test your prototype. The first product tester will be you. Pretend you are a customer who just purchased your invention. How well does it do its job? Take notes about what works and what doesn’t. You can make changes in the next version.
3. REMIX. Did playing with your invention go the way you expected? Now’s your chance to experiment with fixes and improvements. Could adding a new Bit add important features? Would craft materials make it stronger or give it a new look?
   • Try to have another person test it after making changes. If possible, try to find the type of person you’re designing it for. Ask about their favorite parts, and what suggestions they have for making it better. Use their feedback to create an even better version of your invention.
4. SHARE. Film a video featuring your invention! It should explain what your invention is and how it can help make life better for the person you created it for. Submit it to the Invent Page by March 31 at midnight using #Inventforgood.

 

INSPIRATION

Ozobot Morse Code Generator: Communication for the Deaf and Blind by RichB

 

Javer Glass (Improved Google Glass) by Javerick

 

Medicine Machine by Sky Shin

Littlebits meets LEGO Arm and Hand by mrdb

 

Read More about the #InventForGood Challenge at LittleBits

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Why It’s Critical for the Next Gen to Be Tech Creators Not Consumers

What is Kik and Should Your Child Be Using It?

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The Guardian – Julia Carrie Wong

Company claims as many as 40% of US teens are on the chat app – but after a series of scares, online safety groups urge caution

Kik, like the past, is a foreign country.

The mobile chat app of choice for 40% of US teenagers (according to the company) contains an entire version of the internet inside its virtual borders, but like those pesky high-frequency ringtones, Kik is largely inscrutable to people born before the turn of the millennium.

News that a 13-year-old girl, Nicole Madison Lovell, chatted with an 18-year-old man on Kik the night before he kidnapped and murdered her, however, has added urgency to the parental quest of understanding what kids are getting up to on their phones these days.

What is Kik, and why are kids so into it?

At first glance, Kik is just another free messaging app for smartphones. You log in, you pick a user name, and you send texts, selfies, and emojis to your friends.

But that’s just the first level of the Kik experience, which is clearly designed with a teenage user in mind (“For Kik, youth are the primary focus,” founder and CEO Ted Livingston wrote in 2014).

The app has a built-in web browser and all sorts of internal native apps, which means that once you arrive in Kik, there’s very little reason to leave. You can play mobile games, make memes, watch videos, listen to music, and check out the funniest content on Reddit.

Does it encourage flirting?

Crucially, you can find and chat with total strangers on Kik. Two of the top five internal apps are Flirt!, which gives you a list of users in your age range to, well, flirt with, and Match & Chat, a Tinder-for-Kik that lets you swipe left or right on users and chat with the people who swipe right on you too.

While the ability to match people up with strangers for a conversation is nothing new (remember AOL chatrooms?), what’s concerning to many parents and internet safety experts is that Kik is anonymous. You don’t need to link your account to a phone number, and you don’t need to use your real name.

On Kik, you can be whoever you want.

That freedom seems to foster a certain breed of cyber-libertinism. Within a day of downloading Kik, two Guardian reporters were sent unsolicited photographs of butts and breasts. A third received a message asking if she would “like to show your cute feet”.

Is it dangerous?

Anonymity is an important touchstone of free speech on the internet, and teens are an important target demographic for internet startups. That combination of youth and anonymity has proved exceedingly valuable to Kik, which has beenvalued at $1bn, but also dangerous to some of its young users.

Local news reports are chock-full of tales of predators using the app to prey on children, either by contacting potential victims before meeting and raping them or by extracting child abuse material from them.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Artificial Intelligence Mentors And Learning

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eLearning Industry – Emiliano De Laurentiis

Babies are ready to learn. They learn organically when physically and mentally ready to learn. Children do it naturally. Being the dependent creatures that we are, we depend on mentors to help us learn. With artificial intelligence perhaps artificial intelligence mentors will help us learn!

Most of our lives we learn specifically what we need to achieve our goals. As children we learn how to crawl, walk, and talk when we are physically ready to do so. We learn when our brain is sufficiently developed. We only attempt something new, like the precarious act of walking, when we are motivated to do so. Babies start to crawl to get to something that they want – their mother and her milk, a shiny toy, or perhaps something to explore. We learn to talk to get what we want. We cry to express our desires, to complain about the temperature, or to signal that we have fresh poop!

Our mothers urge us to walk. Our fathers play games with us. Our parents guide us away from dangers. Our mentors help us exercise our inquisitive minds safely. Our mentors help us reach our goals. That is the natural, organic way of learning.

Mentors guide our learning.

Organic Learning 

The organic way of learning continues throughout our lives except for when we are in the formal industrial educational system that we call school. You’ve heard this before. Schools were designed to rapidly teach large groups of people to meet the demands of an industrial age. In school all students are expected to learn the same content at a pace that is set by the system, whether or not they are ready for it. And we are expected to learn on a set deadline. As a society we have been doing this for centuries but it is a difficult way of learning.

The formal industrial education system is not organic.

Student Evaluations 

We measure students according to the formal education system. It’s a contrived way of measuring intelligence, creativity, and productivity. We are judging students on their ability to excel in the system. It does not take into account their individual abilities to learn and to be productive. Some students are slower to learn, but are great problem solvers. Others are not good problem solvers, but can remember anything they read.  Given enough time and motivation anyone can find their niche to excel and achieve fulfillment.

To succeed in school means that we have learned how to succeed in school.

Industrial Education System 

The industrial education system is strong during elementary and high school. College students have more control of their learning but are still subject to a rigid structure. After graduating from college, learning decreases. Unless required for a job learning trails off. Many doctors do not keep up with advances in their professions.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Coding for Girls – Tools to Get Girls More Easily into Tech

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Intel iQ – Jon Irwin

How a hackathon project became a Kickstarter success that is enticing young students to dive into the world of software development.

Computer programs allow us to build almost anything these days, from complicated construction blueprints to amazingly life-like CGI visuals. Vidcode, started by Alexandra Diracles and Melissa Halfon, builds something even more important: confidence in young girls.

“Programming used to be a jumble [for me to understand],” says Emma, a 14-year-old user of Vidcode’s online software that teaches how to edit videos by changing the code itself.

“But now that I see the vocabulary and how it works, it’s a lot simpler, and I feel confident to continue coding.”

Vidcode’s Diracles didn’t learn to code until going to graduate school. She realized her own lack of interest was not a purposeful choice. It had more to do with the notion that most girls believe computer programming is for boys.

This perception is one Diracles and her business partner, Melissa Halfon, both 29, are trying to fight. But instead of encouraging women to embrace the present culture, which can be full of stigmas and stereotypes, they’re aiming to change how young girls and boys perceive coding in the first place.

In January 2014 in New York City, the two met at the Startup Weekend EDU NYC hackathon, which is an event where programmers come together over a weekend and build a project from scratch.

Halfon had been looking for ways to balance the gender gap in computer engineering, while Diracles’ research focused on how videos could grab the attention of girls who had never programmed but who loved posting and sharing videos online.

When the two merged their ideas during that hackathon, the result was an early version of Vidcode, a web-based application that encourages teens to see coding, not as not a technical bore, but as a tool for creativity.

That early version won Best New Idea at the hackathon.

Halfon said this win was the confidence booster that moved the team forward.

“We had this immediate validation,” she said.

Nine months later, Halfon and Diracles ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $30,000 to help turn their idea into a product, and them into owners of a company.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn

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The New York Times – John Markoff

The world’s most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.

“Learning How To Learn,” which was created by Barbara Oakley, an electrical engineer, and Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, has been ranked as the leading class by enrollment in a survey of the 50 largest online courses released earlier this month by the Online Course Report website.

The course is “aimed at a broad audience of learners who wanted to improve their learning performance based on what we know about how brains learn,” said Dr. Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

With 1,192,697 students enrolled since the course was created last year, “Learning How to Learn,” which is offered by the University of California through Coursera, an online learning company which has partnered with a number of universities, has narrowly edged out the more tightly focused course, “Machine Learning,” taught by Stanford University professor Andrew Ng, which currently has 1,122,031 students enrolled.

The similar enrollment figures are striking in part because the field of machine learning has become one of the hottest university areas of study in recent years. High technology companies are competing intensely in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for newly minted data scientists.

The enrollment figures indicate that massively open online courses, or MOOCs, which in 2012 emerged as a potentially disruptive force that some believed might threaten the modern educational system, are continuing to evolve and gaining broad acceptance as part of an increasingly diverse marketplace for online education.

The Achilles heel of the MOOC phenomena has been that while enrollments have been huge, the number of students who actually complete courses for credit has remained low. That has led traditional educators to argue that the new technology would fail because students are generally less motivated to complete coursework online.

The completion rate — or “stickiness” — of the “Learning How to Learn” course has been above 20 percent, said Dr. Sejnowski, roughly twice the average for most MOOCs. He said the course is now attracting about 2,000 new students a day from 200 countries. The course was created after the two researchers met at the National Science Foundation-financed Science of Learning Center at the University of California at San Diego, which Dr. Sejnowski directs.

Dr. Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, acknowledged that although only roughly 50,000 of the more than one million enrollees in her course had actually received a certificate for the course, certification was the wrong metric to understand the impact of the new form of online education.

“People frame it incorrectly,” she said. “Students are clearly hungry to learn, and they’re particularly hungry for practically useful, scientifically based information told in a way that they can really get it.”

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Tinder and 5 More Adult Dating Apps Teens Are Using

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Common Sense Media – Polly Conway

Unless you’re single, you might not be familiar with dating apps such as Tinder, where users can quickly swipe through prospective dates. But it’s likely your teen knows all about these apps — even though they’re mostly designed for adults. According to the company’s own estimates, about 7 percent of Tinder’s users are age 13 to 17.

Although adults use these apps both for casual hookups and for scouting out more long-term relationships, they’re risky for teens. For starters, although many of the apps aren’t intended for them, it’s easy for savvy teens to get around registration-related age restrictions. Secondly, adults can pose as teens and vice versa. Location-sharing increases the potential for a real-life meeting; less dangerous but still troubling is the heavy emphasis on looks as a basis for judgment.

It’s possible that teens are only testing boundaries with these apps. Many are eager to be on the same wavelength as their 20-something counterparts, and the prospect of meeting someone outside their social circles is exciting. And with so much of their social lives happening online, teens feel comfortable using apps to meet people. But these apps are not a safe way for them to explore dating. A Virginia Tech college student allegedly abducted and killed a 13-year-old girl he may have met through Kik or a teen dating Facebook group.

If you learn your teen is using dating apps, take the opportunity to talk about using social media safely and responsibly — and discuss what’s out of bounds. Keep lines of communication open; talk to them about how they approach dating and relationships and how to create a healthy, fulfilling one — and note that these usually don’t start with a swipe.

Below are some of the adult dating apps that teens are using.

Badoo. This adults-only app for online-dating-style social networking boasts more than 200 million users worldwide. The app (and the companion desktop version) identifies the location of a user by tracking his or her device’s location and then matches pictures and profiles of potentially thousands of people the user could contact in the surrounding area.
What parents need to know. Badoo is definitely not for kids; its policy requests that no photos of anyone under 18 be posted. However, content isn’t moderated, and lots of sexual images show up as you browse.

Hot or Not. This app started as a website over 10 years ago and has gone through lots of iterations. It currently exists as a location-based app that shows you the hottest — or most-attractive-per-the-rating-system — people nearby.
What parents need to know. A user must first set up an account of his own, with photos — and must verify his identity with a working email address or a Facebook account and a mobile phone number. The site says it will not accept a profile unless the user is 13 or older and that users 13 to 17 can’t chat or share photos with users older than 17 — but there’s no age-verification process.

Kik. Part text-messaging app, part social network, Kik gives users the opportunity to talk to both friends and strangers. Kids like it because it’s free, it’s popular with their friends, and they can quickly and efficiently add cool Web content — memes, viral videos, images, and more — to their texts without any message or character limits. It also contains many mini-apps, most of which aren’t sanctioned or created by Kik.
What parents need to know. Although not an official hookup site, Kik is known for creating hookup opportunities. Third-party apps embedded within Kik, including a Tinder-like mini-app, are difficult for parents to regulate.

MeetMe. MeetMe‘s tagline, “Chat and Meet New People,” says it all. Although not marketed as a dating app, MeetMe does have a Match feature where users can “secretly admire” others, and its large user base means fast-paced communication and guaranteed attention. Users can chat with whomever’s online, as well as search locally, opening the door for potential trouble.
What parents need to know. First and last name, age, and ZIP code are requested at registration, or you can log in using a Facebook account. The app also asks permission to use location services on your teens’ mobile devices, meaning they can find the closest matches wherever they go.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog