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Level Up Report
March 9, 2018
I have to admit that I'm getting tired of talking about video games and gun violence in our weekly newsletter, when the research seems largely settled. But it's in the news, so this is the third week in a row that we're talking about it at the top. With luck soon we can get back to talking about games for learning again!
Thanks to Chris Melissinos and Russell Shilling for contributions to this week's news! Send us YOUR news at news@levelup.org.
News
On March 8, the Trump administration held a meeting on violent video games in the White House Cabinet Room, with members of the game industry as well as critics. The meeting kicked off with a video of graphic scenes from video games and then apparently segued into round-the-table feedback. To learn more, read this piece on The Verge. If you're getting flashbacks to the 2013 meeting with VP Biden, read Kyle Orland's piece on Ars Technica. Now let's get back to our regularly scheduled conversation. :)
 Mattel announced that it is launching 17 new Barbie dolls styled after modern-day and historical role models. We love the doll for "Hidden Figures" mathematician Katherine Johnson, who worked as a computer at NASA.
The latest K-12 computer hardware sales numbers from Futuresource Consulting show Microsoft gaining some ground in the U.S. during Q4 2017, increasing its share from 22.3% to 25.6%. Google devices held pretty solid though, decreasing just a smidge, from 59.8% to 59.6%.
Edutopia conducted a personal interview with Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org. I appreciated reading his origin story and why he believes learning programming should begin in Kindergarten. (Spoiler alert: So do I!)
I'm constantly jealous of Pittsburgh's impressive edtech scene. Can you believe that the greater Pittsburgh area has more than 150 makerspaces? That makes the region a great place to learn about how to improve equity in making.
Chinese video game publisher Tencent - which holds a stake in the companies that produce both League of Legends and Fortnite - has pledged to introduce "digital contracts" in its games. These contracts will enable parents to control the amount of time their children can play the games, and allow them to set up reward systems for good grades or housework. This will be interesting to keep an eye on.
 Were you a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood fan? This is the 50th year since the show launched on national public television. Catch five of the most memorable segments in this piece on the New York Times site.
The Center for Early Learning at Silicon Valley Community Foundation offered five quick tips for educators on how to help families use technology better outside of the classroom.
The Lanier Cluster is a group of schools in Gwinnett County school district, Georgia, that use project-based learning techniques to teach 21st-century skills. The instruction doesn't look the same at every grade level. This Edutopia piece details some of the similarities and differences.
Yes you can teach your pre-Kindergartener STEM skills! Here are eight simple things to try to introduce STEM to kids at an early age, from the Hechinger Report.
In New York City, low-income students that participated in a math-focused preschool curriculum and extracurricular math clubs closed nearly 30 percent of their achievement gap by the end of kindergarten. The students displayed better working memory and attitudes toward math a year after completing the program.
Google released an extensive report surveying pre-college computer science education and currently available research on best education practices. The report takes a unique approach, integrating the feedback of 14 researchers and practitioners who were asked to provide early reviews of the survey results.
Play
 Bad News (Web) – Try your hand at spreading fake news in this game from DROG, a multidisciplinary European team of academics, journalists, and media-experts. Get as many followers as you can through exaggeration, attacking, and outright lying!
Galaga in HTML5 (Web) – I couldn't stop futzing with this great HTML5 port of Galaga this week. Paolo Severini built this a few years ago from a PC-native version he had written. Read more about the port process here. It's an awful lot of fun!
Watch
 Waymo 360-degree Experience – Google's self-driving cars have an amazing array of sensors that help the cars understand the world around them. This Waymo 360-degree video does a really clever job of visualizing all of that sensor data, perhaps to help us mortals feel better about climbing into the passenger seat!
Why do mirrors flip horizontally (but not vertically)? – This video is a few years old now but it's still great! Have you ever stopped to wonder why the mirror you're staring into hasn't flipped your body vertically as well as horizontally? Check out this great explanation of what's actually going on!
Petoi: OpenCat Demo – There are a lot of robot dogs out there but few robot cats! It's just not fair. So Rongzhong Li decided to build his own. Follow his hardware and software development process, from the original hacked up "version zero" to the very latest 3D-printed version! Such impressive work.
Quark-85 Demo Kube – It's fun to take low-powered devices and push them to their limits. What do you think you can get a 99-cent AVR Tiny85 to do? It's an 8-bit 20MHz microcontroller with just 512 bytes of RAM. Prepare to have your mind blown.
Sites to Follow
So. Many. Great. Things on the Internet! Here's a site I visit a lot: Techmeme. Catch up on the day's technology news quickly with this tech consolidation site. On Techmeme you'll find links to the news articles that are hot right now, and find way too many other websites that you want to keep up on!
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