The LEGO Foundation is partnering with the Lemann Foundation to make education in Brazil more equitable.
The Brazilian non-profit org was awarded a nearly US$4-million grant as part of LEGO’s Tech & Play Initiative. With this funding, the Lemann Foundation plans to implement a four-year Creative Schools Program through its Brazilian Creative Learning Network. The initiative which will reach more than 500,000 students in the region is designed to provide hands-on educational opportunities with a focus on technology and play.
MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium Museum, and the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University all had a hand in developing the Creative Schools Program as partners.
What exactly happens when we read computer code? Some interesting research was recently funded to find out by the National Science Foundation, the Department of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Four researchers three from MIT and one from Tufts University performed MRI scans on the brains of dozens of participants performing “program comprehension tasks” in which they predicted a program’s output.
The idea was to determine how exactly computer code is comprehended in the brain how the variables, function names, and keywords become meaningful expressions and then coalesce into a larger whole. Would there be clues for computer science educators or even some tantalizing insights for the IT world’s developers? And perhaps most notably for computer programming instructors, it seeks to answer the question what part of the brain is most responsible for learning coding skills. Is it the