#Classcraft a new way to teach students by turning the classroom into a giant role-playing game Classcraft Shawn Young,
a high school physics, has a class full of warriors, mages, and healers. Warriors get to eat in class,
mages can teleport out of a lecture, and healers can ask if an exam answer is correct.
But this isn t some Dungeons & dragons-style fantasy. This is education as it s happening for over 7, 000 kids in more than 25 countries right now.
Young has been developing and refining Classcraft, his classroom-based role-playing game for the past three years,
and he says it creates a collaborative and supportive learning environment that can help turn around students who are failing.
Currently a free service, Classcraft will introduce a pay structure this fall that embraces the free-to-play model more commonly seen in mobile apps and online games like League of Legends and Runescape.
It s going to turn heads in an education system used to strict budgets and paying per-head for software solutions,
especially when they realize that the students will be buying gear and pets for their Classcraft avatars on itunes. Playing in class If you re a gamer,
being in Shawn Young s physics classroom sounds like a blast. At the start of class, his students come in
and check their stats on the screen projected at the front of the room. When the bell rings, its time for a random event,
which could impact one or more players. It might be a disaster, like a pupil s game character dying,
or it could be something goofy like someone getting up to sing. This helps focus the students,
Young told Gamesbeat during a video call, asthe second they get into class, they want to know what s going to happen.
The different classes in the game balance to encourage teamwork. As the lesson progresses Young will dish out experience points for good work
and collaboration and will give hit damage to students who lack focus or misbehave. Students can gain powers specific to their character class by levelling up,
and they can use these to help and protect their teammates (or themselves), activating them live as events that unfold in the classroom.
The teacher can track all this activity in Classcraft, or, as in Young s case, the kids can use their laptops to interact with it in real-time.
Come September, they ll be able to use their smartphones to keep up with the game too,
with an ios app set for release and an Android version to follow. Cutting class and eating chocolate As the Game Master,
Young s students are playing by his rules, but the chance to turn things in their favor is always there.
Some powers have potent individual and team effects, and the students can get pretty creative with them.
There s one power, Teleport, where you can leave the class for 2 minutes, says Young,
so they ll stack that and leave for 10 minutes. That kind of annoying, but at the same time it s part of the game.
Some kids also used the warrior s power to eat in class as an excuse to bring in a chocolate fondue.
Young admits that the rewards on offer in Classcraft are often outside the normal rules of school,
but he says that s what makes them so appealing. I m like, OK, I m cool this is hilarious,
says Young. It goes both ways. As the Games master, you buy into that, but then when they die they get these horrible consequences.
If a pupil s hit points run out, they die. They then face a punishment that a roll of the die determines
Students don t typically respond happily to punishments. But they are. It s weird. Transforming the classroom through collaboration Young had the Classcraft idea in his head for several years before acting on it.
Before making it he tried various ways of getting kids to collaborate better in class,
something he believes is important in a 21st century that s proving a boom time for sharing, not least through social media.
though, and he doesn t think the education system values it enough. Our whole system of pupil rewards is based on individual assessments
he says, and that s not useful for them. What s useful for them is seeing the value of your team succeeding as opposed to yourself,
That really transforms the classroom. The history teacher Ricardo Higuera teaches seventh grade world history in a rural corner of Southern California called Thermal.
Nearly all the students in his middle school are eligible for free or reduced school lunches. Higuera s been trialling Classcraft for the past 4 months
and he s thrilled with how it s making his students care about their grades.
Academically, I have noticed quiz scores and class-participation increase, Higuera told me via email. Before, some of my more apathetic students wouldn t care
if they failed a quiz. Now, they re more wary to because they know it affects their character s level
and team standings in the game. Classcraft has helped also with the flow of his lessons.
I pride myself in running a smooth, fun classroom even before Classcraft but I ve noticed a huge tick in the pulse of the class
So far, Higuera is the only teacher in his school to try Classcraft. Some of the other staff are unsure of
what it actually is and how to make it part of their teaching. Being the Game Master is a big part of that.
The game like anything else in education, depends on how it s used by the teacher,
said Higuera. Like role-playing games of old, the game depends a lot on the Game Master. He or she holds the power to engage players
and make the game come alive. Higuera already thinks Classcraft will be part of his teaching arsenal for years to come.
I do think Classcraft is ideal for the age group and subject matter I work with, he told me.
Middle school, medieval world history I mean, how cool is that to play a World of Warcraft-like game as you re learning about samurai
knights, and the Aztecs? I m like a kid all over again, playing Dungeons & dragons with my friends.
but many teachers using Classcraft are reporting success. We have some really surprising statistics, says Young.
We have teachers saying their class averages have gone up 20,25 percent in the months following implementing Classcraft.
and encouraging a classroom dynamic rooted in collaboration. The first year I did started this, I it mid-year,
what makes you a good learner. Participating well in class doing your work, collaborating. It really rewards that.
That s how you level up in the game. Classcraft permeates every aspect of school for Young s students.
They get XP for doing well in sports or helping each other after school. They even tidy the classroom in the hope of leveling up quicker.
They become obsessed with becoming a better learner, says Young. They just don t know about it.
Carrot on a stick Not everyone is convinced fully of Classcraft s merits as an educational motivator.
I spoke to Frank Noschese, a high school physics teacher from Cross River N y.,who has a different take on gamifying the classroom.
I don t really look at competition as a good thing in the classroom, Noschese told me over Skype.
At least, he believes, not when kids are striving to earn rewards in a game. You do the work to do better at the game rather than do the work to learn the material,
he said. It sends the wrong message that it s not the learning that s important but the game aspect.
It s very behaviourist. Training the kids to do what they re doing because they get a reward.
On the kids that aren motivated t intrinsically by getting good grades Noschese says thatthere s something else going on.
And I don t think that laying a game over the classroom is really going to fix that scenario.
There s some kids that just can t be in building, shifting through nine different classes for six hours a day, sitting in their seats.
They need a different schooling experience. Noschese thinks that teachers can make classway more engaging without turning it into a game.
He says that his subject, physics, isreally cool just of itself, and describes using a video of NBA star Kobe Bryant jumping over a pool of snakes embedded below to spark a lab-based session where students try to answer the question,
Is it real or is it fake? Despite his reservations about Classcraft, Noschese says he doesn t want to fault Young for trying something new:
Any teacher that s willing to try something new or change their craft is great.
The freemium modelat this moment were having our team of illustrators draw a thousand pieces of gear,
Boots, magic, shields, potions. As students level up, they ll get gold coins as part of their reward.
They can use these to customize their character s look. And interestingly, they ll also be able to buy these coins through the ios app
and on itunes. Young knows this is a huge move for an educational product. It s very
very innovative, he says. I don t know any products that do that for education. I asked Young
whether there would be a cap on the amount of money that students could spend. They cant spend that much money,
he said. After $5 or $6 it doesn t make sense to spend money. But the very idea of kids paying for an educational product may raise eyebrows.
That poses, for some teachers, a certain ethical dilemma of do they want to bring a product into their class that is soliciting kids to spend money?
admits Young. So, for teachers and schools who aren t happy with that principle, Classcraft will have a premium version charged at a rate of $4 per student per year.
That way, pupils can still access the customizable features, but it will be the teachers who hold the keys to the gold.
There will still be a free version of Classcraft without microtransactions available come September, but this will be miss out certain features.
It won t have customizable avatars, pets, ios app support, or interactive class forums. However, the base game will still be fully functional.
The idea of offering a freemium pay model is at its core, a challenge to the school budgeting system and a way of making Classcraft available to all, according to Young.
I ve been teaching for seven years, he says, and for me, one of the main annoyances is this bureaucratic stopper on innovation that comes from, Oh, sure,
we ll put that in the budget for next year, even though you have your great idea right now.
For me, it was important that teachers hop on and just start playing whenever they wanted.
That s when that freemium model was born. We have teachers playing Classcraft in China and India and Namibia.
A lot of these premium education products are only available in the U s. and Canada. It was really important that we were available for these poorer countries.
That a teacher who wanted to start playing just could. The freemium reality For Higuera, the free-to-play
or freemium pay models are the only way his class can keep using Classcraft. I would love to say my principal would purchase the premium access for us,
Not enough of our teachers would use it to make it viable. And I doubt I could afford to pay out of my own pocket.
Higuera thinks his students will love the opportunity to customize their characters but doubts whether many will actually do it.
The ios app due in September will enable the whole system to run on a teacher s ipad
and will give students more immediate ownership of the game. German and Spanish translation will add global appeal to a system which Young says he always intended being an international concern.
Students as young as 8 and as old as 20 are already playing the game,
And the free-to-play business model will permit any teacher, in any country, to jump into the game, regardless of school budgets.
While it doesn t offer an across the board solution to engaging kids in education, it does provide an innovative and unique way of capturing those pupils that might
otherwise shrug their way through school. Video games in a very short time, have become this common cultural reference point that everybody knows,
says Young. Everybody plays games; everybody likes games. For students whose grades are suffering because they re not engaged or they re not motivated.
I think that Classcraft can really make a difference e
#Scientists erase, then restore rats memories Researchers can selectively remove a memory and predictably reactivate it by stimulating nerves in the brain.
The University of California, San diego School of medicine researchers have erased and reactivated memories in rats, profoundly altering the animals reaction to past events.##
said Roberto Malinow, MD, Phd, professor of neurosciences and senior author of the study. Scientists optically stimulated a group of nerves in a rat s brain that had been modified genetically to make them sensitive to light
Malinow, who holds the Shiley Endowed Chair in Alzheimer s disease Research in Honor of Dr. Leon Thal,
noted that the beta amyloid peptide that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer s disease weakens synaptic connections in much the same way that low-frequency stimulation erased memories in the rats.
Since our work shows we can reverse the processes that weaken synapses, we could potentially counteract some of the beta amyloid s effects in Alzheimer s patients,
and your smartphone will find it for you, up to a range of 50 to 150 feet.
It not the first such gadget. But what makes this one different is that it also a social network of sorts.
If your lost jacket isn in some mysterious corner of your home you can ask all other Tile App users to watch for it.
If they get near it, their phones will beep and they can alert you to the jacket whereabouts.
That why its creators, Mike Farley and Nick Evans, call it he world largest lost and found.
In 2013, Tile made news for being the most successful campaign to use open source crowdfunding software elfstarter, on its own website to raise funds.
After the funding campaign closed pre-orders still rolled in. By the end of the year, the company sold more than 450,000 tiles to 125,000 people,
And interest in the gadget still hasn wavered. A few days ago Ross Mason, founder of hot enterprise startup Mulesoft (which raised $130 million in venture investment) tweeted about Tile.
Mason tells us he dabbles in some Angel investing, specifically nternet of Things (Iot) startups, companies making internet-controlled objects t
#Researchers discover new treatment for diabetes Researchers discovered a small molecule that inhibits an enzyme that degrades insulin.
Harvard researchers may have identified finally a chemical compound that could be used to study and treat diabetes after decades of searching.
They have discovered a whole different method for maintaining insulin in the blood: by blocking the enzyme that breaks it down.
and helps regulate the body response to sugars process that goes awry in type 2 diabetes.
Genetic studies have shown that people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to have mutations in the gene that encodes a protein called insulin-degrading enzyme, or IDE.
and then taking advantage of the interactions between two strands of DNA to bring the chemical building blocks together to create new ones.
Patients with type 2 diabetes either have an insufficient amount of insulin in their blood
or do not properly respond to the hormone in order to move the body main energy sourcelucosento cells.
Researchers have speculated for decades that a drug that could inhibit IDE might help some type 2 diabetes patients.
which make up the majority of medicines, are compounds far smaller than less common biological medicines like antibodies.
They are developed using libraries of thousands or millions of known chemical substances. Each compound is screened to see
if it has desired a effect on a biological target, such as an enzyme or other protein known to be involved in a disease.
Pharmaceutical companies may use robotics to test many chemical reactions in parallel. DNA-templated synthesis allows researchers without a lot of expensive equipment to more quickly evaluate all the potential small molecule interactions that could occur from a library of building blocks. single student with only minimal equipment
and infrastructure can evaluate millions of potential small molecule-protein interactions in one to two weeks,
The newly identified IDE inhibitor could be the starting point for developing a powerful new drug for type 2 diabetes.
#The scooter that doubles as a suitcase A Chinese private entrepreneur, He Liangcai, recently obtained a patent for a product that turns a regular suitcase into a rechargeable scooter.
accessed via China intellectual property database, the suitcase is equipped also with a GPS navigator, a burglar alarm and a horn.
Weighing about 15 pounds, Mr. He ulti-functional suitcaseis powered by a lithium battery and can reportedly go as fast as 12 miles per hour.
Mr. He says the suitcase-scooter can carry 2 adults at once and travel as far as 37 miles in one charge
the local Changsha Evening news reported. Mr. He suggests such a device can also be used for in-city travel,
dubbing it an rban scooter. Turning a suitcase into an electric scooter up with a suitcase was no easy task.
According to local reports, Mr. He spent over 10 years to break through the technology issues, such as how to develop the right kind of wheels.
#Prescriptive planting technology is set to disrupt the farming industry The word innovation usually brings to mind small startups doing clever things with cutting-edge technology.
long-established industries and they do not come much larger or older than agriculture. Farmers can be terrible managers,
so it is no surprise that they are nervous about a new idea called prescriptive planting,
It could be the biggest change to agriculture in rich countries since genetically modified crops. And it is proving nearly as controversial
It also plunges stick-in-the-mud farmers into an unfamiliar world of ig dataand privacy battles. Monsanto prescriptive planting system, Fieldscripts, had its first trials last year
Set up by two former Google employees, it used remote sensing and other cartographic techniques to map every field in America (all 25m of them) and superimpose on that all the climate information that it could find.
By 2010 its database contained 150 billion soil observations and 10 trillion weather-simulation points.
The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance. But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1 billionne of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen.
Monsanto, the world largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds,
and terabytes of data on their yields. By adding these to the Climate Corporation soil-and-weather database,
it produced a map of America which says which seed grows best in which field, under what conditions.
Fieldscripts uses all these data to run machines made by Precision Planting, a company Monsanto bought in 2012,
and other devices pulled along behind tractors. Planters have changed radically since they were simple boxes that pushed seeds into the soil at fixed intervals.
Some now steer themselves using GPS. Monsanto, loaded with data, can plant a field with different varieties at different depths
and spacings, varying all this according to the weather. It is as if a farmer can know each of his plants by name.
Prescriptive planting is catching on fast. Last November another seed producer, Du pont Pioneer, linked up with a farm machinery maker, John Deere,
to beam advice on seeds and fertilisers to farmers in the field. A farm-supply cooperative
Land Oakes, bought Geosys, a satellite-imaging company, in December 2013, to boost its farm-data business.
The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5%over two years,
a feat no other single intervention could match. The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushelsiving a terrific boost to growersmeagre margins.
But the story of prescriptive planting is also a cautionary tale about the conflicts that arise when data entrepreneurs meet old-fashioned businessfolk.
Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farmingheir core competence.
However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused.
Their commercial secrets could be sold, or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms
and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets,
to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets. Looking a gift horse in the mouth In response to such worries, the American Farm Bureau,
the country largest organisation of farmers and ranchers, is drawing up a code of conduct, saying that farmers own
and control their data; that companies may not use the information except for the purpose for
which it was given; and that they must not sell or give it to third parties. The companies agree with those principles,
though so far their contracts with farmers do not always embody them. Also, once data have been sent and anonymised,
farmers might be said no longer to own them, so it is not clear what rights to them they still have.
For this reason and others, some Texan farmers have banded together to form the Grower Information Services Cooperative,
to negotiate with the data providers. Another worry is that, since the companies have not yet made the data fully ortable farmers may become locked into doing business with a single provider.
To assuage all these concerns the Climate Corporation has set up a free data storage service for farmers,
which others cannot access without the farmerspermission. New niche data-management firms are entering the market,
which should help make it more competitive. For the time being, though, the biggest companies will dominate prescriptive planting. They collect the most comprehensive data
and make better use of them than anyone else. And that raises a problem which affects big data in all its forms.
Prescriptive planting could boost yields everywhere, just as mass, anonymised patient records could improve health care. But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers
or patients) to trust them. If the users think they are taking a disproportionate share of the risks
while firms are getting an excessive chunk of the benefits, trust will remain in short supply
#Demand for computer science programs is booming at colleges across the U s. People in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the U s. to become interested in studying computer science for years.
It now looks like theye finally gotten the message. Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U s,
. according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer science and Engineering at the University of Washington,
and Stanford Computer science professor Eric Roberts. Demand is also booming for the less expensive Micro Colleges that teach programming skills like Davinci Coders near Boulder, Colorado,
which only costs $6, 000. At Lazowska own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring the graph below,
published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself. It not just UW that seeing A CS boom.
Computer science class enrollment is markedly up at a number of institutions, from traditional tech hubs like MIT and Stanford to more humanities-and business-focused schools like Harvard.
But at the academic level Lazowska and Roberts say that this time around things just feel different than they did during the first dot-com frenzy.
For a variety of reasons, the recent dramatic growth in CS studies may very well continue for a long time,
rather than head for a trough like they did in the early 2000s. With the current shortage of engineers in the job market, this all seems like great news, right?
Well, there a catch. According to Lasowska and Roberts, our higher education institutions today aren prepared adequately to handle the surge in computer science education demand.
At the moment, there just aren enough instructors to teach all the students who want to learn. Many schools are torn currently between either limiting the number of CS degrees they give out,
or letting class sizes become normous. While these may seem like great problems to have,
they are still problems. How will academia handle the big CS boom e
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