iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

“A series of songs to inspire a generation of good,” Right On Tracks are four message-driven music videos for kids that hearken back to the days of the 1970s-era SchoolHouse Rock series. The project, powered by Cheerios and helmed by creative agency 72andSunny, aims to encourage conversations about kindness, inclusion, and empathy.

How does it feel to be old, or colour blind, or the victim of bullying?

Virtual reality can now help us to temporarily live others' experiences, and this may have important psychological benefits. Watch the video above to find out more.

Flippy the robot has been asked to temporarily step aside while his management team can re-train his co-workers to help him become more efficient.

One thing's certain, the new world of work is ever changing. Keep up with fresh developments in the future of work and jobs with these articles from the team at Twenty One Toys.

That the transmission model has collapsed is clear. But it’s now time to take the more difficult step: To acknowledge that living a densely linked life and operating in a non-linear, intimately connected, globally diverse, culturally conflicted world with 16 million text messages exchanged every minute and knowledge itself becoming a social construct mediated by the whole requires entirely new thinking about learning itself.

What will replace the old model? There are three important clues—three sets of data from emerging science—that point us in the direction of a radically new notion of learning in the remainder of the 21st century and beyond.

Mention robots to many English teachers and they’ll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there’s a robot at all, it’s located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It’s not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills.

“For someone like me who teaches literature by lots of dead white guys, teaching programming adds relevance to my class,” said Jessica Herring, a high school English teacher at Benton High School in Arkansas. Herring first experimented using Sphero, essentially a programmable ball, when her American literature class was studying the writing of early settlers. Herring pushed the desks back and drew a maze on the floor with tape representing the journey from Europe to the New World. Her students used class iPads and an introductory manually guided app to steer their Spheros through the maze.

21st century leaders need to adjust to a world of algorithms, automation and AI. According to futurist Mike Walsh, the algorithmic leader of the future will have two key qualities - the ability to understand human behavior, and a flair for computational thinking.