The Digital Adventures Blog
For parents, educators and students to discuss tech education for kids, best practices for teaching coding & engineering design to kids & emerging technology trends
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Parents Should Win the 2020 Teacher of the Year Award
Teachers are a very special group. My mother was a teacher. Many members of my extended family are teachers. I’m married to a teacher. I also run an education technology company that employs teachers to guide students in learning how to build with technology. In essence, I have the utmost respect and the highest regard for teachers. In many ways, one could argue that everyone who has ever learn...
2019: Year in Review and 2020: Looking Ahead
After ~5 years in business, we thought it would be a great time to reflect on the first few years, express gratitude (spoiler alert: Thank you parents/guardians!) for those who have helped us along the way and give a preview for what you can expect in the next decade from Digital Adventures.First and foremost, we want to let you know how truly grateful we are to the parents/guardians of our stu...
A Great End to a Great Season: Fall '19 Showcase
This past weekend, we hosted our showcase event at each studio for the community of learners and parents/guardians who support their journey in learning to building with technology.To say that this event exceeded our expectations would be a severe understatement. Over the past several months, we have continued to iterate on a format for the showcase event that would enable students to demonstra...
Jim's New Adventure
Dear parents, students and loyal fans,As you know, I have been a part of Digital Adventures in Wilmette since opening in 2015. In that time, I have worked alongside a variety of students from four-year-old Lil’ Coders to seniors in high school. We developed exciting technology projects, problem-solved bugs in our code, and built and destroyed robots in the intense battle bots arena. We have ...
Making big things smaller
Around this time of year, everyone is excited about getting started with the new school year. With my kids, things are no different. Recently, my kids started back school. For my son, this marks a switch from elementary into middle school. My daughter is now in her 2nd year of middle school. One thing that I talk a lot about with my kids is making things easier for whoever comes after you. So, ...
I wish my kids knew more about technology
One of the greatest parts about working in a consumer facing business is that you get to talk to a lot of people. In the course of these conversations, if you use your ears and mouth in the proper proportion (2:1), you can learn a lot about not only why parents do enroll their kids in our programs but also why they don't enroll them in our programs. At Digital Adventures, our business is focuse...
Let's Re-Think Education
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are no doubt aware of the college admissions scandal that resulted in indictments of 50 parents around the country who have been charged with paying an admissions counselor millions of dollars to get the children into the schools of their choice.While there is no doubt plenty of blame to go around, it’s also instructive in these situations to look at ...
The Best Teachers Mathematically
No this isn’t a post about how the best teachers are math teachers although I do love math as it forms the foundation for much of my educational and professional experience. Instead, I want to share the idea of how good teaching can be thought of using a mathematical framework.In my estimation, the best teachers are always focused on how to maximize the individual potential of each student. Sin...
Becoming a global shaper
The New York Times recently published an article outlining the two codes, computer science and the U.S. Constitution, kids need to learn in order to make in impact in their career and with their life. This conclusion was based on research conducted by The College Board (administrators of the SAT) that found these two areas were highly correlated with success. Since that time, The College Board ...
Overnight success starts today
By the time someone like Bill Gates (Microsoft) or Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square) or Sheryl Sandberg (Google & Facebook) or Marissa Mayer (Google & Yahoo), it may seem like their success was immediate and predictable.However, if you dig a bit deeper, you will learn that each of these experts spent years developing and honing their abilities. With repeated pr...
NO - You can’t learn to code in an hour
There are profound joys and utter disappointments that come with educating kids. Personally, I’ve always said that having kids is one of the longest term, high risk, high reward investments one can make. For at least 18 years but often for their entire lives, parents invest in their children in hopes that they will be successful. It isn’t until some point far in the future where we know whether...
26 tech words parents of tech-savvy kids should know
Every parent wants the opportunity to speak the language of their kids. For those of us who didn’t grow up with an Apple II, it may seem as though your tech-savvy kid is speaking a foreign language. However, it doesn’t have to be so difficult to understand what your kid is talking about. Below, we have put together a list of 26 common words that the parents of techie kids should know. Coding (...
Introducing Brain Sports | Innovative New Approach to Teaching Kids To Code
Over the past several years, Digital Adventures has worked to develop an education technology platform designed for kids who we believe are the emerging technologists that focuses on teaching our students to build with technology independently so they could one day change the world with their innovations and inventions. While, we’ve had great success in terms of the number of students we’ve wor...
4 Reasons Why We Celebrate Epic Failures at Digital Adventures
Ask anyone who has done programming for a meaningful period of time and they will describe the pleasure and pain of building with technology. On the one hand, when they build a new website, mobile app or product feature; there is a sense of euphoria along with a tremendous sense of accomplishment that human has conquered machine. On the other hand, the effort required to push through epic inter...
5 Key Reasons Why We Love our Competitors
When we started Digital Adventures 3 years ago, we had a vision for how we would teach kids to build with technology so that they could one day change the world! Since, that time, we have built out a curriculum leveraging best-in-class hardware & software programs, launched purposely-designed learning studios, hired engaging instructors, built a data-driven back-end technology platform focu...