News

The Digital Education Centre formally launched on 26th November at a party in the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the High Street, Edinburgh.

We had an excellent and well-attended night, and it was great to have so many colleagues, students and friends come and share the celebration.

We celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the MSc in Digital Education at the same time, and with graduation happening the following day, were able to welcome many of our graduands too.

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.

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. 

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.