Flipping the classroom empowers students to take control of their learning process. It gives students a voice and choice in what they're learning and how they're learning it. Our guest, Tim Selgrat, is an educator who has used his background in basketball coaching to embrace the strategies of flipping the classroom and has seen how it pays off with students. Selgrat has been a technology teacher for almost two decades and has spent the last six years dedicated to STEAM and growth mindset. He views his classroom as a team, saying: 

“Good coaching is good teaching and good teaching is good coaching. So you want to put your players in a position to win. So really for me, I would try to position my players where their strengths are, and we build on those strengths.”

In this conversation, Selgrat explains that with flipping the classroom, students have on-demand resources and information at their fingertips. Students have the freedom to work at their own pace, taking ownership and their learning into their own hands. Selgrat describes how with this approach, he is able to let students work towards their strengths, and in doing so, students are able to be more engaged in learning. Some of the strategies for flipping the classroom include leveraging videos for instruction and also screen recording for student reflection. Selgrat discusses some of the tools and technologies that made it easier for him to make the transformation into a flipped classroom and his advice for educators hoping to do the same. Selgrat discusses some of the challenging parts of flipping the classroom and encourages teachers to be authentic, be yourself, and to trust your students. It can be intimidating for some, and he encourages teachers to jump in feet first rather than waiting for perfection. This approach is about giving up some control, opening up your classroom, and becoming a different kind of teacher.

Recommended Resources from the Interview:

Flipgrid

Schoology

Story Maker

G Suite/Google Workspace

Surveys and case studies are useful tools in understanding the mindset of teachers. This year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s 8th Annual Educator Confidence Report asked teachers about issues that impact them daily, with a focus on technology and their current needs. The purpose of this report is to give voice to educators and for those who didn't participate to learn from their colleagues. The key takeaways from this year's report include topics like educator retention and well-being and the role technology is playing for teachers and students. In this episode, our guest, Francie Alexander, discusses this report and shares her advice for making a positive impact in EdTech. This report revealed that EdTech is a bright spot in education, with teachers saying that tech is essential. Alexander elaborates:

“It is an integrated part, just like it is in your work and mine. And you won't find anyone who will say technology is not an important part of every child's future in how they're going to learn and how they're going to live. So if they're learning using these tools, they're more future ready, and that becomes another important part of what teachers do.”

Technology is an important tool that teachers have and it’s going to make teachers more effective in their work. The survey points to three significant ways that teachers are using technology - to be connected, to build community, and to customize. Furthermore, Alexander mentions that there were four major ways that teachers use technology: for productivity tools, data insights, social networking, and instructionally. 

In conclusion, Alexander shares her advice for making a positive impact in EdTech. She encourages asking experts and examining the evidence. A guiding acronym that she uses is TOO - Think Of Others. Alexander adds that she wants to encourage people to keep learning.

“You're gonna make mistakes because we all do. But if you are doing it from the perspective of thinking of others, then you're gonna fix it.” - Francie Alexander

Recommended Resources from the Interview:

HMH's 2022 Educator Confidence Report

Whether it’s robotics, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence, how do we help students prepare for future careers in technology? In this podcast episode, our guest Tatenda Mapesa, shares how his work has been impacting the future readiness of kids in South Africa. In this conversation, Tatenda explains how an interest in aeronautical engineering and a growing passion for education led him to embrace the role of CEO of Brighter Futures and to devote his life to bridging the education gap between the haves and the have nots and cultivating a new generation of talent equipped with the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to thrive in the future workplace.

A Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway, characterized by a fusion of technologies that blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. Tatenda discusses what the Fourth Industrial Revolution means to him and how it impacts the work of Brighter Futures. He emphasizes the importance of adapting. The world is changing and it’s important to be able to learn different technologies and to adapt to new software programs and programming languages, for example. Tatenda describes the approach of Brighter Futures as teaching students to have an understanding of strategies, like the design thinking process, and to apply these concepts to different kinds of problems. Furthermore, Tatenda discusses replicating work experiences in the learning experiences for kids. For example, utilizing hands-on projects, encouraging students to learn how to collaborate in teams, and exposing students to different careers.

Tatenda shares a favorite fable of his - the story of the Chicken and the Eagle. This tale emphasizes the importance of exposing kids to different experiences, so that their understanding of their own potential is expanded. Part of future readiness is knowing what’s out there in the world. When asked about how he envisions the future of EdTech for students in South Africa, Tatenda believes we should focus more on the integration of technology into classrooms and training personnel how to adapt with different technologies. Tatenda shares his advice for parents who want to make sure their children are future ready and emphasizes the importance of exposing kids to different kinds of technologies.

In conclusion, Tatenda shares a favorite quote of his:

“We can't build the future for our children, but what we can do is build our children for the future." 

And the way to do that is to make learning experiences interactive and engaging. Furthermore, we need to make sure kids are exposed to different technologies, so that they can adapt to the necessities of future careers.

Computational action is an approach that provides students with opportunities to impact their lives and their communities while learning programming and computational thinking. A computational action approach provides students with real world problems and real world contexts to apply their computer science knowledge. This approach can make computing education more inclusive, motivating, and empowering for young learners.

In this episode, Natalie Lao, Executive Director of the App Inventor Foundation, shares how she's fostered computational action with kids from around the world and integrated this mindset into schools and classrooms. The App Inventor Foundation is a nonprofit established by the creators of App Inventor, a free and open-source web platform that empowers learners, hobbyists, and inventors across the globe to create mobile apps for real, effective change in their communities.

Through the course of the conversation, Lao shares her advice for students and teachers wanting to integrate computational action into their own lives. She emphasizes the importance of engaging with a problem in your community that you really care about and addressing that problem using computer science.

Game-based learning is an effort to redirect the learning that naturally occurs very organically in games and to channel that towards subjects and skills that are useful outside of the game itself. In this episode, Bobby Lockhart and Valentin Bryukhanov, two game developers who were key to creating our text-based coding adventure game, Ozaria, discuss game-based learning and how to use the principles and strategies of game design to create engaging learning experiences.

In this conversation, our guests discuss the distinction between game-based learning and educational games and the importance of various perspectives when designing. “Every game is educational, but we can put more intention in that goal” Briukhanov says.

What does chocolate covered broccoli have to do with game design?! Lockhart explains that when the game mechanics and the learning concept don't match up, you have chocolate covered broccoli. Broccoli is nice on its own and chocolate is nice on its own, and if you combine them, it's no good at all. An engaging learning experience thoughtfully integrates the game mechanics and learning concepts.

Concluding the conversation, Lockhart and Briukhanov discuss how game design can make an impact on the future of education and share their advice for those interested in game design for the EdTech space.

Recommended Resources from the Interview:

Books:

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Gee

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Level Up! The Guide to Great Video GameDesign by Scott Rogers

The Children's Machine by Seymour Papert

Some of our guests' personal favorite games:

Codemancer

while True: learn()

Assassin's Creed

Civilization

League of Legends

Dota

Professional engineer and founder of homeschool kit Tinker the Robot, Kay Yang, shares how the gender gap in engineering inspired her company and tells the “aha moment” that led her to widen the scope of Tinker the Robot’s impact on families. She reveals how being intentional about giving kids some ownership over the content and fast small wins are key ingredients to the kits’ success. “The goal is to build confidence so that you know you can do this. And so if there’s a point in the project where you feel uncomfortable or intimidated, you can draw upon that moment and remember that I’ve done this before. I can do this,” Yang says.

In this episode, the incredibly inspirational high school graduate Mohamed Haggag discusses how using “learner agency” has been a cornerstone of his education in Egypt. From tutoring peers at a really young age to implementing a foreign language program that is now used nationwide, Haggag has taken on different leadership roles throughout his academic career. 

Today, he balances many roles. Haggag served as an ambassador for the World Literacy Foundation, an intern at CodeCombat, and founder of Next Coders' Society, a program teaching tech literacy to young people as it aims to create equity and inclusion in technology throughout his country. 

Through the course of the conversation, Haggag shares the strategies he is using in Next Coders’ Society to engage young people to learn about technology and become community tech leaders. He emphasizes the importance of individuals learning information and then engaging and teaching that information to others, noting that the scope of information that one can pass on to someone else is inconsequential.   

In this episode, Brian Freyermuth reveals how he’s used storytelling and game design to engage players throughout his career. 

Starting at the beginning — Freyermuth’s entry into the gaming world would begin as one would imagine: as a child. He explains how a simulation game set in the Caribbean sparked his interest in programming. By senior year, Freyermuth had decided to make games for a living. On a college campus, his quest to create games would begin with learning to program objects because game design courses didn’t exist. 

Throughout the conversation, Freyermuth shares how a handful of fortuitous events ushered him into the world of game design. From a serendipitous conversation with a teacher and a few buddies after class to a casual chat with a gentleman at a party to failing an interview with a guy named Alan, it’s clear that Freyermuth’s lucky breaks stemmed from infectious passion.

Now much further along in his career, Freyermuth talks about navigating the game design process by using pillars to establish “the why” of a project and explains how storytelling is integral to building a world.   

At CodeCombat, Freyermuth expresses how he used his background in the entertainment industry, creating games like Fallout, Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, and so on, to make engaging learning games for kids. 

Studies show a strong social and emotional learning (SEL) foundation has positive outcomes, from increased academic achievement and graduation rates to improved prosocial skills that support a child’s success in school and beyond.

In this episode, Darri Stephens discusses how she has used and built SEL measures in the classroom, in subsequent roles at Common Sense and Wonder Workshop, and now as a consultant. 

At Common Sense, she describes how SEL was woven into the company’s digital literacy and digital citizenship curriculum. At Wonder Workshop, Stephens reflects on how SEL was infused in the company’s worldwide robotics competition, where students spent months in teams, problem-solving, embracing challenges, and “failing forward”. 

Today, Stephens serves as a consultant for organizations like Classroom Champions. Stephens tells how Olympians and other elite world-class athletes are teaching kids SEL skills through the Classroom Champions’ curriculum. She shares how the organization gives kids an incredible VIP access to the athletes so that they can form a mentor-mentee relationship through live chats, video updates, and monthly challenges.

Educator, Author, and Director of Education at Microsoft’s Makecode Kiki Prottsman describes how her college experiences of being the only female in the room propelled her into her work. 

Prottsman expresses how a single question drove her into her career. She wondered, “why don’t people realize how expressive computer science is?” She became convinced that if people knew how fun and creative coding is then there would be wider interest in it. This revelation led her to build a groundbreaking curriculum to teach kids how to code at Code.org. Yet, the road to bringing a CS curriculum to kids was not easy. She talks about the challenges and the pushback she received when telling others about her initiative to bring the curriculum to young kids. 

As part of the process, Kiki used the four pillars of computational thinking to showcase how the skills we learn from coding can be used to solve everyday problems.

Be prepared to be inspired as Prottsman shares how she persisted through naysayers, explains computational thinking, and expresses her initial fear of becoming an author of CS books.