Teaching children STEM skills for sustainability
CategoriesSustainable News

Teaching children STEM skills for sustainability

Spotted: Often, it can be challenging for teachers to effectively communicate sustainability topics to their students. Research shows that educators worldwide experience difficulties from combining the various aspects of sustainability and feeling unprepared for the content, to lacking the necessary resources, materials, or time to provide comprehensive lessons. 

Twin Science recognised that the traditional educational approaches are insufficient to tackle these issues and is, instead, using STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) for children’s sustainability education. While volunteering with the Young Guru Academy, the makers behind Twin Science saw the power of STEM education to deliver engaging workshops to children in underprivileged areas. 

The company uses a range of hybrid products to support its double-winged approach to education and has integrated the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the curriculum to provide a framework for addressing social, environmental, and economic challenges. Twin Science’s STEM Kits include hands-on activities and electronic modules for students to explore robotics and coding concepts. The mobile app serves as a “digital companion” for students, giving them access to interactive sustainability content, games, challenges, trivia quizzes, and additional learning resources. 

The teacher platform provides access to educational resources, curriculum materials, and teacher support, enabling educators to access lesson plans, track student progress, and facilitate discussions and collaboration among students.  

Twin Science is now focusing on enhancing its artificial-intelligence- (AI) powered teaching assistant tools to provide personalised support for teachers, parents, and students. The company is also exploring the use of augmented and virtual reality for immersive educational content to enhance students’ understanding and engagement. 

We need to educate the current cohort of students about what is happening to our planet, and traditional teaching methods aren’t cutting it. In the archive, Springwise has spotted other innovators thinking differently to provide better education on sustainability, like those using fairy tales to teach climate change and toy wooden cubes to teach children about energy sustainability. 

Written By: Anam Alam

Reference

A VR brain training app to test cognitive skills
CategoriesSustainable News

A VR brain training app to test cognitive skills

Spotted: Lisbon-based Virtuleap is a health and education startup using artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) to elevate the cognitive assessment and training industry. The company believes that VR brain training can add value to any healthy lifestyle as a frequent activity taking up less than 10 minutes per session.

Virtuleap’s core product, Enhance, is a VR app with a library of brain training games that test and train various cognitive skills like memory, problem-solving, spatial orientation, and motor control. The company says that VR “engages multiple learning systems, which makes it a more effective and natural environment for cognitive training than 2D screen-based brain training apps”.  

Enhance’s games are designed by neuroscientists and game designers with the intention of being both fun and effective. The app currently offers more than 14 short games across nine different categories: memory, problem-solving, flexibility, working memory, spatial orientation, motor control, auditory cognition, task switching, and planning – with Additional skills to be introduced in the near future.

The app also allows users to track their progress with reporting tools to know how their quality of sleep and moods affect their cognitive performance.​

In 2020, the company published a white paper citing 76 peer-reviewed studies explaining why they believe that VR cognitive training systems may transfer and improve specific domains or global cognition. 

Parallel with Enhance, Virtuleap also developed a web-based dashboard for corporations, such as senior living communities, hospitals, clinics, and educational institutions, to access reporting and data tools. The company hopes its platform will provide caregivers with additional capabilities to help the aging population with cognitive conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. 

Other medical uses of VR spotted by Springwise include a virtual environment for treating phobias, gamified neurology treatments, and a VR live stream of surgical procedures for remote learning.

Written By: Katrina Lane

Email: support@virtuleap.com

Website: virtuleap.com/enhance

Reference