The words that could unlock your child
- 20 Apr
As children face their final month of revision before the exam season starts, many parents are looking for the words to motivate their offspring. But could they be mistakenly praising the value of ability over effort, asks Matthew Syed.
Take a glance at these expressions of encouragement:
"You learned that so quickly, you're so smart!"
"Look at that drawing. Are you the next Picasso or what?"
"You're so brilliant - you passed that exam without really studying!"
Gaming in the Triangle gets serious
- 20 Apr
Aten Inc.'s new free iPhone game Rhythmatical teaches students the connection between music and math.
Thomas Vaidhyan admits he can attribute much of what he’s learned about gaming to his young son.
When Vaidhyan, now the CEO of IT firm and game developer Aten Inc., first arrived in the Triangle, he realized quickly something was missing in the classroom.
“When I started getting involved with sending my son to schools here, I started researching quite a bit on that and found out very surprisingly, for me, a lot of the technologies and innovations that we’re getting incubated in our universities and developed in our industries weren’t necessarily percolating into our school systems,” he said.
To him, pulling gaming into the classroom was a no-brainer.
“It made a lot of simple common sense to use games for translating some of the abstract concepts in a very simple, easy-to-understand means to children,” he said.
That’s why his company, guided by a growing body of educational research, has been working to develop engines and applications in the rapidly expanding field of serious games, which teach and test users’ skills while they play.
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