Lilian Marchesoni

Great post, Molly. I believe this is a niche that is constantly growing and littleBits is easy to use and very intuitive. Back in Brazil, the institution I worked for inaugurated the first bilingual Maker Space in Latin America and we had some littleBits kits. Working with those blocks was fun, engaging and kids felt clearly empowered. In relation to Ayah, I agree with you that besides her background as a computer engineer and her master's at MIT Media Lab, she demonstrates she is a skillful visionary and is in tune with the advancements in the field.

Hi Kate. Thanks for sharing this comprehensive review on Voxy and Paul Goulart. Back in Brazil, a representative from Voxy tried to partner with the Binational Center I worked at, and the product they presented is indeed really interesting. I still remember them demonstrating how the app creates song exercises based on the list of songs you have on your phone. I specially liked your comment on the connection between success and resilience. I agree it's an important characteristic of successful entrepreneurs for it gives them the ability to overcome adversity, learn from it, and push through to new heights.

I believe game-based learning has a lot of potential given the fact that they provide rich opportunities to engage students as active learners. This learning approach help students work towards a goal, choosing actions and experiencing the results of their moves; it's about failing and learning from mistakes, and trying again, and this might lead to better long-term retention of content. As Dustin pointed out, it is hard to believe that game-based learning is not as popular.

"There's an app for that!" Everyone likes to joke about it, but it is actually true. There are thousands of apps available for nearly everything you could possibly imagine. The challenge for educators, then, is to find the right educational apps that are able to promote fun and engaged learning. Apps have the ability to boost engagement through knowledge-oriented activities and enhance students' productivity, making the learning process fun and easy.

The number of mobile devices has increased exponentially in the last years and they are now considered one of the most promising learning technologies. Most of that is due to the fact that not only they allow users to access digital content in a very personalized way, but also provide access to a huge amount of data anywhere without constraints. Mobile learning allows to place the learner at the centre of the learning process, and as stated by Katie above, they also enable users to have access to several learning technologies within a single device. In addition, students would have a shorter learning curve because they are already used to these devices.