What Juliet, MacGyver, and Captain Sideways Can Teach Us About Problem-Solving
“Functional fixedness” punks problem-solving. Here’s how to open your mind to the possibilities of everyday objects.
Continue Reading“Functional fixedness” punks problem-solving. Here’s how to open your mind to the possibilities of everyday objects.
Continue ReadingYounger kids, without the bludgeon of logic, may be better able to open their minds to intuition.
Continue ReadingChalk it up to mindset: UW Madison research shows that following the instructions of a LEGO kit undercuts creativity in subsequent tasks.
Continue ReadingMassive data mining and Yale creativity research converge on a thin-slice test for creativity — and a powerful way to boost it.
Continue ReadingHere’s what happens when Ben from Sparkfun Education, a PhD psychologist, and a 3rd grade teacher talk about technology and innovation in education.
Continue ReadingDid you know that an octopus tastes with its suckers? If you’d visited DKFindOut, you would.
Continue ReadingAnticipating a vacation makes you happy, but actually taking one does not. That is, unless you chillax. Here’s how.
Continue ReadingNot long after opening its doors, Modular Robotics of Boulder, Colorado found itself in crisis: “The six-packs went incredibly fast,” says Education Director, Christie Veitch.
Continue ReadingCan you guess how many gifts were requested per letter? And of them, how many requests came with specific brands?
Continue ReadingWith no glue and no connectors, how would you go about building this cube?
Continue ReadingWhat do you get when you hang a Christmas tree with 4,000 LEDs connected to a Teensy board? In the hands of Austin maker and electrical engineer Jarrod Eliason, you get, well, you get this…
Continue ReadingThe shipping department was full of dudes with asymmetric facial hair on skateboards. An engineer had picked up about a thousand Keva planks and on an upstairs wrap-around counter space, there was a crowdsourced build going on — in which you could tell the crowd had higher than the average bear’s level of design thinking skills. Strung on a wall was a DIY art piece made of light bulbs and wire that was set to ripple in response to sounds. A trigger-operated race car track wound underneath a 7-foot tall version of one of those wooden dinosaur skeleton kits.
Continue ReadingWhether here. there or elsewhere, let’s put some tools in our kids’ hands and get the Ziploc bags ready.
Continue ReadingThis video of ice-veined chicken played between two middle-aged suburbanites driving electric vehicles is sure to be an instant viral hit. So you might want to share it quickly before your friends beat you to it. Twisted metal! Total carnage! Total entertainment!
Continue ReadingIn 2010, astronomer and author Jeffrey Bennett answered a call from a number he didn’t recognize. The voice on the other end told him that astronaut Alvin Drew wanted to read one of Bennett’s books from space — Drew needed a pdf.
Continue ReadingAll that detritus, burst forth and bite us; It’s less than handsome, under the transom; How’s this my life here? (Don’t tell my wife here!); Under the seat.
Continue ReadingI like to think that I’m moderately concerned about the environment. And I like to think that I’m willing to gamble on an EV to provide a market that pushes the technology forward. But really I am a skinflint.
Continue ReadingMaps of kale preference, Crossfit, livability for hippies and more are the brain child of one man, Ryan Nickum, blogging for the real estate site Estately. Is content marketing via the inane intersection of data and geekified awesomeness genius or madness? We called Ryan Nickum to find out.
Continue ReadingGeekDad covered the Kickstarter, now here’s the result: Return to Zero is a movement as well as a movie. This Saturday, help break the silence.
Continue ReadingWhen the apocalypse comes, would you want you and your children to survive, only your children to survive, only you to survive, or everyone to go as quickly as possible in the first wave?
Continue ReadingI was at the park the other day throwing pine cones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pine cones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much.
Continue ReadingThe quality of the explanations you offer to your children will influence their perception of your credibility. Not only that, but your explanations will influence how likely your kids are to ask you for explanations in the future.
Continue ReadingIn this age of Candy Crush and YouTube fail compilations, science shows how to encourage a 7-year-old to stick with his violin teacher’s insistence on months spent perfecting the perfect hand and bow position (and other boring things).
Continue ReadingResearcher: “Cultivation of the basic personality features of openness to experience in children and adolescents may increase an individual’s trait creativity and, thereby, facilitate divergent thinking and creative achievement.”
Continue ReadingFor every prodigy, there’s a profile: distinct brain abilities help to make astounding performance possible.
Continue ReadingWhen excluded from a game, 12.6% of kids were directly assertive, insisting to be included. But 42.5% passively withdrew. But it wasn’t simply shy kids that pulled away. The difference was largely something called “cognitive conflict” as measured by a hairnet of electrodes.
Continue ReadingAccording to one expert, most common learning strategies are actually hurting our ability to acquire and retain long-term knowledge.
Continue ReadingA study on early view at the journal Child Development asks an interesting question: who cares about popularity? Really what the study asks is who most cares about popular people? Sure, everyone gives popular kids more attention, but who is most likely to give the most attention?
Continue ReadingRemember the Tower of Hanoi — that game with discs and pegs? Well it requires planning, specifically the ability to see that you have to move away from your goal so that you can eventually move toward it. A study in the journal Child Development shows that kids’ Tower of Hanoi ability is a better predictor of math and reading success than socioeconomic status or anything else. And that training this important skill of planning may help disadvantaged kids catch up.
Continue ReadingThe number of words a child knows when he or she enters kindergarten is an astoundingly good predictor of how well they’ll do in school and even how they will much later do in the workplace. A study from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that it’s quality and not quantity of speech that teaches vocabulary. If your speech matches your actions and the surrounding context, kids learn your words — if not, it’s just talk.
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