Mentor Spotlight: Trish Fontanilla

In this week’s spotlight is Trish Fontanilla, the Community Manager at Vsnap. Not only is Trish a returning mentor, she is actually mentoring two te...

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Rinse and Repeat: How to Start a Business

Think about an app or gadget you love to use. Is it Instagram? Is it Snapchat? Your smart phone? Whatever it is, at some point it did not exist. At so...

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What are badges, and how will education use them?

Badges are soon to be, if not already, a hot topic in education.  Yet unlike many other hot topics, it’s a little unclear what badges are and w...

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Iridescent’s experiences with teacher and school evaluation

We like to do things at scale, cheaply, fast and for the long term. So when we started working with a lot of schools in Los Angeles, I figured it woul...

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High School Explainers Do Research on Olympics

Our high school Explainers became citizen scientists this summer, helping Professor Jill McNitt-Gray of the University of Southern California with her...

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The Khan Academy Controversy

The Khan Academy is arguably one of those products that can revolutionize education.  And in fact, this is being argued quite extensively la...

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The Curiosity Machine and Iridescent at NSLA

I wanted to share two exciting announcements.  First, earlier this summer, the Curiosity Machine was launched!  The Curiosity Machine is our...

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Little Engineers and Parents (LEAP) – pilot sessions

We had our first Little Engineers and Parents session and explored a variation of the Ramps and Pathways activity. Our goals were to help the parents ...

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Science for pre-schoolers – lessons from the field

I have been doing a few half-hour science sessions at a Montessori school. Some of the topics we covered were: buoyancy and designing boats of aluminu...

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Intrinsic Reward Structures in games and learning

This is a quick follow-up to the last post on games and education, I’d suggest reading that first, or at least the section on “Reward Structures,�...

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The Role of Games in Education

Games are highly addictive learning tools, that are for the most part not directed at educational topics. Yet I would argue that there is nothing prev...

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Questioning the hypothesis

This is cross-posted on Sciencefare. In my recent NSTA talk, I advocated a view of the scientific method that did not include the hypothesis. What bla...

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