By now, you’re either living under a rock or you’ve seen the plastic trinkets being churned out by the many hot new 3D printers on the market. I attended this year’s Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. It may have been the largest gathering of 3D printer aficionados yet. The [...]

By now, you’re either living under a rock or you’ve seen the plastic trinkets being churned out by the many hot new 3D printers on the market.   I attended this year’s Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. It may have been the largest gathering of 3D printer aficionados yet.   The Maker Faire [...]

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center studies children’s media from various vantage points. Their most recent study looked at parents’ preferences when it came to reading with their young (ages 2-6) children. What they found was a mixed bag. While parents who read iPad books with their kids found certain features helpful, they found others distracting. They gave [...]

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine unlike any other. It’s called a computational search engine which, at the end of the day, means that you’re not searching for weblinks to other sites but rather getting a data analysis from information about those sites. It’s best used for searching on things that can be measured: cancer [...]

I first talked to Patrick Ambrose while he was still a student at Syracuse University, working on the earliest version of BrandYourself. Ambrose and his co-creators saw first-hand how otherwise good kids were getting bad reps from silly social networking mistakes. The idea behind BrandYourself is to create a service to surface the good stuff [...]

Confused about the future of the television? No more so than the people who are building it. Research states that more than half of households in North America and Western Europe will be connected to the Internet through their television sets within five years, but how they’re going to connect is anybody’s guess. Today, the [...]

I stopped by the Art of the Video Game at the Smithsonian in DC last week.  The exhibit took viewers on a waltz through video gaming from Atari to Xbox. While the kiosks were ok, the conversations that these machines evoked were positively marvelous.  Dads turning to their young kids, and telling them about their early [...]

It’s Friday night at 11, and suddenly I find myself with that all-important contract that needs to be signed and countersigned by Monday morning. I don’t know about you, but I junked my paperweight cum fax machine (recycled actually) about a decade ago. I lost my password to the fax email service I used to [...]

Nolan Bushnell likes to play. He believes that even the most ADD of us can focus and pay attention when we’re deeply involved in a game. And he believes that our current education system is desperately broken. Bushnell, who’s made a healthy living from playing, is out to take the lessons learned from building Atari, [...]

Kids who cut their teeth on PCs in the early 1990s will fondly remember Living Books from Broderbund Software. For millions of kids around the world, Living Books was their first interactive experience. Engaging stories with clickable words and drawings captivated the first generation of on-screen readers. These classic titles were retired and collecting dust [...]