Introducing the Leap

BL-103: Teaching Each Student (K-12) Description This course will help you analyze data from your blended/personalized classroom with an informed eye, then transfer that knowledge to your planning through focused groups, flexible long-term planning, and personalization by giving students choice around path and pace. You’ll leave this course knowing why your blended practice should be grounded in instructional challenges/student needs and how you can leverage technology to address those challenges, so you can teach each student in a more personalized manner. Objectives In this course, participants will:

NASA remotely controls Athlete rover with Leap Motion: 'let's bring a billion human beings into a holodeck' "Just for you guys today we're going to do something special, something that's never been done before" said Victor Luo, NASA human interface engineer. "We're going to drive this robot, on stage at GDC, with a Leap Motion device." In an unexpected demonstration at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, scientists from NASA used the Leap Motion to control a six-legged, one-ton Athlete rover located at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. Why immersive virtual reality is the next generation of gaming: part 1 FOV2GO (credit: USC/MxR) It’s now obvious that immersive virtual reality is finally back in the consumer market — with a vengeance. Especially with the recent advent of FOV2GO, a free DIY portable fold-out iPhone and Android viewer that turns the smartphone screen into a 3-D VR system.

The Leap: Gesture control like Kinect, but cheaper and much higher resolution It seems Minority Report-style computer interfaces might arrive a whole lot sooner than we expected: A new USB device, called The Leap, creates an 8-cubic-feet bubble of “interaction space,” which detects your hand gestures down to an accuracy of 0.01 millimeters — about 200 times more accurate than “existing touch-free products and technologies,” such as your smartphone’s touchscreen… or Microsoft Kinect. Before you read any further, watch the video below. It’s really rather awesome — and apparently the video is footage of a real The Leap unit, rather than a computer rendering (you know a device is serious when the The is part of the product name).

The Lean Startup “Startup success can be engineered by following the process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”- Eric Ries The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get a desired product to customers' hands faster. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to new product development.

Your Next Computer Will Live on Your Arm Thalmic Labs co-founder Stephen Lake building the Myo. Photo: Thalmic Labs Forget about robots rising up against humans for world domination. Our Fabulous Future: Corporate America’s Great Tech-Utopia Movies The best way to predict the future, as Alan Kay famously said, is to invent it. For decades, however, well-known technology companies have tried an easier approach: filming it. They’ve done so in the form of short movies featuring mocked-up versions of the wondrous technologies that will be everyday realities for the consumers of tomorrow. (Many of the tomorrows in question — 1960, 1976, 1986, 1999, 2o04 — have since come and gone.) These films tend to have a self-important feel, as if paying actors to pretend to interact with make-believe gadgets was a vital part of bringing said gadgets to market. Even though the companies that produced them have only rarely gone on to make the products they depict.

Fast & Secure: Sleek Fingerprint-Scanning Door Handle Lock Opening a door is usually done in a single motion – we take for granted that this is just not possible when it comes to one with a locking mechanism, whether it be low-tech like a key or high-tech like an iris scanner. Most fingerprint-reading door locks require that you depress an area, listen for a click or maybe look for a light, then grab the handle and go – not a big deal, but definitely one more step than necessary. Donguk Seo proposes a simpler model that works with a single motion – just grab, press and push or pull all in the same simple motion, while an LED on the end lets you know if there is any issue with your first try.

Toddlers and Tablets The first iPad was released in April 2010. Three years later, a Pew Internet survey found that half of American parents with children at home own a tablet computer. Mosey on over to the iTunes app store, and 9 of the top 10 paid education apps are designed for small children, ages four and up. China Could Supplant U.S. as the Supercomputing Superpower China’s Tihane-2, the world’s top supercomputer. Photo: Jack Dongarra Two weeks ago, Jack Dongarra flew to Changsha, China for a meeting with researchers at the National University of Defense Technology, home to the country’s top supercomputing program.