How Educational is Your Child’s Favourite App?

If your child loves playing on the iPhone, tablet, computer, or video game console, as a parent, how do you determine the educational value of each app or game?

Common Sense Media has released a list of four things to keep in mind while assessing each app and game that your child can’t put down.

1. Learning Potential – Could the product potentially facilitate learning? Will you extend the lessons and topics learned outside of your child’s interaction with the app/game?
2. Know Your Child – Is your child a math whiz, artist, tinkerer? Look for products that feed their interests and strengths, but also push their boundaries.
3. The Power of Balance – Apps and games should be a means to an end: the end being an interest that extends beyond the technology at hand. Kids shouldn’t be exclusively or excessively spending time with a particular product or technology
4. Get Involved – Educate yourself on the technology available, and make the most of the time your children spend with apps and games. Ask open-ended questions to further the learning.

What are some of your favourite educational games and apps for kids? Did any surprise you in how well they facilitated your child’s learning?

Proposed UK Information Technology Curriculum for Kindergarten Onward

The digital literacy curriculum draft initiative in UK schools promises to be “creative, pervasive and designed for all.”

The initiative, outlined in an article posted as part of the Guardian‘s Digital Literacy Campaign, was compiled under expert guidance of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS). Though the British Department of Education has not yet endorsed the plan, it promises to “fit the 21st century…from children at key stage one through to mobile app programmers working at A-level standard and beyond.”

The proposed initiative would have children from age 5 to age 14 learn general digital literacy, computer science, and information technology. After age 14, they could specialize in their area of interest. And this would be far from solely hard coding: Alex Hope, co-author of the Next Generation Skills Report, argues:

“We need rigorous teaching of computing in schools, but fusing art and technology together. We need to be creators of technology, making games or fighting cyber-crime, rather than just passive users of it. We need an education system that allows art and science to be taught alongside each other; those countries who allow this to happen will grow and thrive, and those that don’t will be passive consumers.”

What do you think? Should Canada have a fully integrated Digital Literacy curriculum? At what point should Computer Science be taught in schools?