Andrew Manches (with Judy Robertson, Gnanathusharan Rajendran and Peter McKenna) has been awarded a research incentive grant by the Carnegie Trust to investigate the role of embodiment in the way individuals think about basic Computing concepts.
At the Children and Technology group we are always thinking about how to communicate our research to the public!
In case you missed the Fringe in August, the Children and Technology Group’s Dr Andrew Manches supported the BBC during their Digital Weekend by sharing some computing activities.
We want to contribute ever more to events like this in the future, so if you are interested, keep posted on our news feed for information about upcoming appearances.
Remember the “digital native” hype from the early 2000s? There was a lot of discussion about how there was a new generation of children growing up were born with access to technology, and that their technological prowess would be such that traditional education would need to reform to accommodate it. Research evidence is now growing to confirm that the superior skills of digital natives are in fact not a reality. So you can feel quite smug if you rolled your eyes every time someone mentioned “digital natives” since 2001.
With the evolution of technology moving at an ever faster pace, how do changes in the ways children interact with technology affect they way they think and learn?
Dr Andrew Manches discusses this issue from experience working with children in the following video.
Doing a PhD within a niche, interdisciplinary field can be filled with both euphoric highs and confusing lows. Am I doing something so ground-breaking that it will make simultaneous waves within several fields? Or is my work so niche it will fail to even register a ripple on any of its founding disciplines? As a result, hearing of success within your niche can help calm these choppy waters.
