Fantastic Educational Technology
Here’s a list of my favorite edtech products. These tools are fantastic because the gameplay engages people in a substantive thinking process.
Better Vision Through Training
Children with poor vision see vast improvement in their peripheral vision after only eight hours of training using kid-friendly video games. Most surprising, scientists say, is the range of visual gains the children made were quickly acquired and stable when tested a year later.
“Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead, and as a consequence they neglect their peripheral vision,” says Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.
“When we realized that the students achieved up to 50 percent improvement in visual tasks, we were blown away.”
“This is problematic because visual periphery — which plays a critical role in mobility and other key visual functions — is often less affected by visual impairments.”
“We know that action video games (AVG) can improve visual perception, so we isolated the AVG components that we thought would have the strongest effect on perception and devised a kid-friendly game that compels players to pay attention to the entire visual field, not just where their vision is most impaired,” says Tadin, who is also a professor in the Center for Visual Science. “As a result, we’ve seen up to 50 percent improvement in visual perception tasks.”
Successful AVG players distribute and switch their attention across a wide area, while at the same time they remain vigilant for unexpected moving targets to appear, all while ignoring irrelevant stimuli.
To Build a Better Ballot
Nicky Case has built an interactive visualization for how various voting mechanisms work in different countries to illustrate how different systems would effect outcomes. By creating an interactive visualization, Nicky takes a dry subject and turns it into an engaging experience. He writes:
Rebuilding trust is a complex problem with no easy solutions. But I think there is an easy first step. It’s a step that could get rid of our “lesser of two evils” problem, and give us citizens more choices, better choices. And yet, it won’t be as daunting as fixing campaign finance or gerrymandering or lack of proportional representation, no, it’d just require changing a piece of paper, and how we count those pieces of paper.
