New Report: Teens Spend A ‘Mind-Boggling’ 9 hours A Day Using Media

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CNN – Kelly Wallace

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that a new report found that teens and tweens spend a lot of time watching TV, videos and movies, playing video games, reading, listening to music and checking social media, but you might be somewhat shocked (I was!) by just how much time.

On any given day, teens in the United States spend about nine hours using media for their enjoyment, according to the report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on helping children, parents and educators navigate the world of media and technology.

Why some 13-year-olds check social media 100 times a day

Let’s just put nine hours in context for a second. That’s more time than teens typically spend sleeping, and more time than they spend with their parents and teachers. And the nine hours does not include time spent using media at school or for their homework.

Tweens, identified as children 8 to 12, spend about six hours, on average, consuming media, the report found.

Parents, here’s how to stop the worst of social media

“I think the sheer volume of media technology that kids are exposed to on a daily basis is mind-boggling,” said James Steyer, chief executive officer and founder ofCommon Sense Media, in an interview.

“It just shows you that these kids live in this massive 24/7 digital media technology world, and it’s shaping every aspect of their life. They spend far more time with media technology than any other thing in their life. This is the dominant intermediary in their life.”

The report, the first large-scale study to explore tweens and teens’ use of the full range of media, according to Common Sense Media, is based on a national sample of more than 2,600 young people ages 8 to 18.

When it comes to consuming media on screens, including laptops. smartphones and tablets, teens, on average, spend more than six and a half hours on screens and tweens more than four and a half hours, the report found.

Pediatricians to tweak ‘outdated’ screen time rules

“I just think that it should be a complete wake-up call to every parent, educator, policymaker, business person (and) tech industry person that the reshaping of our media tech landscape is first and foremost affecting young people’s lives and reshaping childhood and adolescence,” said Steyer, who’s most recent book is “Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age.”

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Get the full report from Common Sense Media

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Meet The Girls Solving The World’s Problems In CODEGIRL

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Forbes – Amy Guttman

Meet the girls solving the world’s problems in CODEGIRL, a documentary released this week on YouTube, and available to view for free until this Thursday. The film follows teams of high school aged girls from Moldova to Brazil developing apps to address global needs – starting in their own backyard. The winning team TISI +% gets $10,000 to complete their app and launch it, but as the film unfolds we see that for many of the girls, the payoff comes well before the winners are announced. Filmmaker Lesley Chilcott, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” shadows the girls in the run-up to the Technovation Challenge. The international competition aims to encourage girls to enter the typically male-dominant field of coding.

The low number of women working in tech and the disparity between female founders who receive funding and men is nothing new. By 2017, the app market will be valued at $77 billion and Technovation estimates over 80% of developers are male. For the past six years, the girls-only challenge, sponsored and run by non-profit Iridescent, has awarded and empowered girls from around the globe to raise awareness of science, tech, engineering and math education. In other words, making tech accessible to girls.

In the 108-minute film we meet the girls aged 10-18, who get together with each other and a local mentor, before and after school for three months to create a winning app that solves a problem in their community.

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What the Future of Tech Skills Education Could Look Like

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MindShift – Anya Kamenetz, NPR

Our Ideas series is exploring how innovation happens in education.

Accordingly, the company tends to favor Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT. But, it has just partnered with a for-profit company called General Assembly to offer a series of short, non-credit courses for people who want to learn how to build applications for Android, Google’s mobile platform. Short, as in just 12 weeks from novice to employable.

This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that’s grown up in about five years.

Bootcamps are designed to teach cutting-edge technical skills like being a web developer or a mobile-app developer. Charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for tuition, with no previous experience required, in the course of just three to six months they promise to make participants highly employable in a lucrative and fast-growing industry.

As the industry grows, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, notably about ensuring quality and honesty in reporting of statistics like job placement. (A recent survey by an organization called Course Reportsays 66 percent of bootcamp graduates are employed in a related field and that they experienced a 38 percent salary bump on average.)

Still, the sector has attracted attention not just from major employers like Google, but from startup private education lenders, the big for-profit education companies and, not surprisingly, from regulators within the Department of Education as well.

For more thoughts on the future of tech-skills education and skills training more generally, I called up Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly — one of the emerging leaders in this new sector.

Schwartz didn’t expect to go into the education business, much less start “a global educational institution.” In 2011, he and cofounders Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer and Brad Hargreaves opened a co-working space in Manhattan, where startup companies could rent desk space and share resources and networking opportunities.

To help pay the rent, they started holding workshops at night on topics like web design. Today they have 14 campuses in seven countries.

How did the new collaboration with Google arise? What are they getting out of this?

Android is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world — they have a billion users worldwide. We released a jobs report this summer with Burning Glass showing that demand for mobile developers has grown by over 150 percent in the last five years. I’m pumped that Google wanted to do this with us.

How heavily involved was Google in helping you develop these programs?

They made introductions, offered input on best practices, collaborated on the curriculum and contributed devices for students to use. And I expect they’ll continue to be involved and to offer networking opportunities to students.

So, this makes me think of how, in a previous generation, a community college may have helped trained welders to work in the local factory. Do you all see yourselves as the technical-skills providers for a new industry and a new generation?

This is not a new idea — I’m sure Detroit was filled with these kinds of programs back in the day. GE and AT&T had their own college campuses where new hires and employees would spend weeks at a time. They were making massive investments in training. And as average employee tenure went down, these investments also decreased.

We focus on the students first, but we see this as a two-sided market, addressing the needs of both companies and employees.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Super Cool Spider That Aims To Help Kids Learn Robotics

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Mashable – Stan Schroeder

We’ve seen quite a few robots imitating nature — mostly made by scientists in university labs — but what if you could build your own and control it with your smartphone?

STEMI — a play on the acronym STEM, meaning Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — is an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a hexapod robot that moves like to a spider. Unlike many other commercial robots, however, this one comes in a kit, together with a set of multimedia lessons that helps you assemble it into a working robot.

Although primarily aimed for kids, STEMI is actually quite a capable little thing and will likely be interesting to adults as well. It can perform complex movements, change height, walk in three different, nature-inspired ways, and even dance. You control it with a smartphone app that uses the built-in gyroscopic sensor, letting you control the robot’s movement by tilting the phone.

Assembling is half the fun, here. According to the project’s homepage, by building the robot you’ll learn the basics of 3D modeling, electronics, mobile app coding and Arduino programming.

The STEMI platform is fully Open Access, meaning everyone will be able to freely modify all of its aspects. The founders promised to make the source code, as well as all the blueprints and 3D models free and accessible to everyone.

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Overhelping’ Is Ruining A Generation Of Children

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Independent – Emma Brown

Protecting children might help them develop impressive resumes, but it robs them of the chance to learn who they are

Julie Lythcott-Haims noticed a disturbing trend during her decade as a dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Incoming students were brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless, on paper. But with each year, more of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves.

At the same time, parents were becoming more and more involved in their children’s lives. They talked to their children multiple times a day and swooped in to personally intervene anytime something difficult happened.

From her position at one of the world’s most prestigious schools, Lythcott-Haims came to believe that mothers and fathers in affluent communities have been hobbling their children by trying so hard to make sure they succeed, and by working so diligently to protect them from disappointment and failure and hardship.

Such “overhelping” might assist children in developing impressive resumes for college admission. But it also robs them of the chance to learn who they are, what they love and how to navigate the world, Lythcott-Haims argues in her book “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”

“We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But overhelping causes harm,” she writes. “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.”

Lythcott-Haims is one of a growing number of writers — including Jessica Lahey (“The Gift of Failure”) and Jennifer Senior (“All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood”) — who are urging stressed-out helicopter parents to breathe and loosen their grip on their children.

“Don’t call me a parenting expert,” she said in an interview. “I’m interested in humans thriving, and it turns out that overparenting is getting in the way of that.”

She cites reams of statistics on the rise of depression and other mental and emotional health problems among the nation’s young people. She has seen the effects up close: Lythcott-Haims lives in Palo Alto, Calif., a community that, following a string of suicides in the past year, has undertaken a period of soul-searching about what parents can do to stem the pressure that young people face.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

How To Help Your Child Become a Maker

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Maker Kids

Parents often ask us, how can I make my child a maker? Well the answer is, you can’t. They have to “make” their own decision to become a maker. What is a maker, you might ask? It’s just like it sounds: a maker is someone who makes things. In recent years, there has been a cultural renaissance going back to the age where many people made things themselves rather than buying them at a store or on a website themselves. People are tinkering with their computers, making websites, and in general feeling the benefits that making can bring you – confidence, meeting new people, and more  We’ve seen the emergence of Make Magazine, Maker Faires (attended by hundreds of thousands of people in cities worldwide), and maker companies such as Arduino (an open source hardware prototyping platform), the Pebble smartwatch (which was prototyped on Arduino), and marketplaces to facilitate enterprise for these makers – such as Kickstarter or Etsy. We decided to jump into the mix with a kids’ makerspace called MakerKids, figuring that since childhood is the most formative stage in life, it’s the perfect time to equip them with the soft skills and technical know-how to help them become leaders of the 21st century.

Now back to to topic at hand. Let’s say your child is currently a classic consumer – they love watching TV, reading books, but they don’t really enjoy making things themselves. Or maybe they are making some things but it’s not really technological. We think any kind of making is awesome, but one of our favourite kinds is the kind where kids realize that they can build and influence the world around them. There’s an awesome Steve Jobs quote that I love, which says: “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” Imagine if you can figure this out as a child.

We’ve absolutely seen this happen with kids. One 10-year-old boy started coming to MakerKids because he loved Minecraft and his parents had heard that we have Minecraft classes. We use Minecraft as a ‘gateway’ to get kids interested in other topics such as electronics, 3D Printing, coding, and more – all related and transferable skills. This boy learned to build audio speakers while in one of our programs. And then afterwards, he started his own business making and fixing speakers! He sells to neighbours and friends. Later he told me he wanted to buy a computer, and I had the absolute pleasure of being able to teach him about revenue, expenses, and profit margins to try to help him accomplish his goal. Then he spied a computer-building kit on one of our shelves (the $150 Kano kit) and the inevitable question came: “Do you think I could build a computer myself?” My answer? “Of course!” There are so many awesome tools out there for kids these days.

Through this example hopefully you’ve begun to see the powerful effect of one of our key philosophies on how to help your child become a maker: let them follow their interests. Minecraft is a controversial topic for sure, but in our experience, it’s a force that can be used for good. It’s surprisingly accurate when it comes to teaching kids principles of electricity, and we show them how lighting up an LED lightbulb with a battery is exactly like lighting up a torch in Minecraft. Starting with an interest in Minecraft, kids can branch off to learn about file structures (through mods), coding (through using commands such as WorldEdit to build big structures), setting up servers, graphic design (through skins), and use their Minecraft 3D design skills to build something to 3D print. Your child can look up tutorials online, attend classes (we have some starting up in a few weeks), read books, and even play Minecraft with you! And there are lots of online resources that show the educational benefits of Minecraft and how teachers and parents can leverage them.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Risk Is Essential To Childhood – As Are Scrapes, Grazes, Falls and Panic