Eisenhower's Ability to "Sneer" a Powerful Motivator

By the time Dwight David Eisenhower was first elected president in 1952, he was already 62 years old. Despite this, he had had a relatively unremarkable health history. A 1923 appendectomy left him with a predilection to develop lesions between the lining of the abdominal cavity and the scar. In 1949, his doctor told him to cut down on his four-pack-a-day smoking habit. Eisenhower, after just a few days of limiting his cigarettes, quit cold turkey and never smoked again. He attributed his suc...

 Input and Output Randomness

The fundamental difference between randomness that support strategy and randomness that under cuts strategy, input randomness allows the player to build the strategy output randomness undercuts it and limits your ability to plan ahead. For example let's look at Pandemic this is a great example of input randomness flicking the cards is certainly random, create a situation that the players need to react to that reaction is completely deterministic. If for example you have to roll dies if you re...

 Pianos Make Music Accessible Like Computers Make Math Acc...

Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means "soft-loud") was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is "technology only for people who are born before it was invented,' and in the case of the piano, this applies to no one alive today. Seymour Papert, the MIT researcher, concluded, "That...

 Gaming Produces a Meditative State

Your brain, in other words, may not consent to be trained. But t will improve a few of these key skills if you let it enjoy a few hours of the first-person shooter BioShock. Recent research, the 2012 re noted, has revealed action games' positive effects, not just on attentional control and emotional regulation, but also on decision making, "mental rotation" (the ability to create a mental image of m object and manipulate it in three dimensions), and the ability to switch rapidly between compe...

 Credit is Trust in the Future

We’ve already seen that money is an astounding thing because it can represent myriad di

 The Role of the Educator In Regards to the Future

The world is changing -- it is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time. Our world shrinks as technologies now allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with peers around the world. Conversely, the explosion of information now available to us expands our view of the world. As a result of the ability to communicate globally and the information explosion, education must change. Most educators might not want to change, but the change is coming -- it is a matter of whe...

 Programming as a Way of Thinking

Running programs is the whole point of programming, of course, but there is more to it. The ability to execute code makes programming a tool for thinking and exploring. When we express ideas as programs, we make them testable; when we debug programs, we are also debugging our brains.

 What We Learn from Games

What also went unremarked was how much I was learning by playing these games: basic ideas such as taking turns and developing patience while others completed their turns, the strengthening of simple memory, improved physical coordination, an ability to recognize and act on patterns, the capacity to see what might happen in a few turns if I took one move as opposed to another, resilience when losing, and the kind of strategic thinking that emerges once you realize that Scrabble is both a game ...

 You were never actually accomplishing anything by watchin...

If you ask someone what they accomplish by watching the news, you’ll hear vague notions like, “It’s our civic duty to stay informed!” or “I need to know what’s going on in the world,” or “We can’t just ignore these issues,” none of which answer the question. “Being informed” sounds like an accomplishment, but it implies that any information will do. You can become informed by reading a bus schedule. A month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything u...

 Core Elements of Reading Skills

In 2008, the National Institute of Literacy issued its report, Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, and, among its many findings, stated that the foundational reading and writing skills that develop from birth to age five have a clear and consistently strong relationship with later conventional literacy skills. “These six variables not only correlated with later literacy as shown by data drawn from multiple studies with large numbers of children, but also ...