One summer, when I was in elementary school, I was terrified! You see, by the end of the school year I had not yet memorized the Times Table and I knew that I'd be entering the upcoming school year clearly disadvantaged. I imagined a disappointed teacher and my embarrassment and humiliation amongst my schoolmates. That is pretty much what happened!

Jack and Jill are working on a physics problem. Their teacher asked them to calculate the force needed to hurl a 500 pound projectile from a spot on Earth to 20,000 miles in low earth orbit. They don’t have any idea of what they need to know to solve this problem and they don’t want to dig through numerous articles or videos on the subject. They want to learn what they need for this problem as thoroughly and rapidly as possible.

Current e-learning has been focused primarily on mimicking the classroom, except that the teacher takes on a less important role. Students are interacting with content that a subject matter expert assembled, but there is no direct relationship between the student and the content matter expert, a.k.a., the teacher. Webinars and the occasional live interaction are inadequate substitutes for the classroom experience.

Sandra Ponce de Leon writes about Knowledge Avatars.

The word Avatar has significant meaning in Hindi, it means the physical representation of a deity on earth, Knowledge Avatars takes inspiration from the word and aims to create the largest database of minds on earth through its digital tutoring platform.

We hear it every day. “It’s a great value for the money,” but really, what does that actually mean to educators and students alike? What exactly is the value of an education?

Statistics from the US Census Bureau and 2010 report by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workplace offer some striking insights on the value of an education:

Most of our lives we learn specifically what we need to achieve our goals. As children, we learn how to crawl, walk, and talk when we are physically ready to do so and when our brains are sufficiently developed to take on the task. Even so, we will only attempt something new, like the precarious act of walking, when we are motivated to do it. Babies start to crawl to get to something that they want, their mother and her milk, for example, a shiny toy, or perhaps something to explore. Similarly, we learn to talk to get what we want.

Since the early days of computers, many of us dreamed of how computers were going to revolutionize education. We didn’t know exactly how it was going to work, but we knew that the “personal” computer made it possible to individualize education. In learning, one size does not fit all, so individualized education is the “holy grail” of education! Industrialization brought us mass education, essential to building an educated workforce, but today’s workforce requires specialization and skills that are way beyond group-think. 

Knowledge Avatars™ help students learn by allowing them to focus on the concepts they need to reach their goals. It provides exactly the content they need, in the most effective way, to understand the concepts in a rich, adaptive, multimedia environment.

Knowledge Avatars is an Intelligent Tutor authoring and publishing system. How can human tutors use it to enhance their business?

This article is about the value of programming as a teaching tool not to teach programming, but rather as a medium that students use to illustrate their understanding of a concept. For example, if a student can program a computer to draw circles using basic trigonometric functions, then the student understands the concept of a circle at a very fundamental level. If a student develops a simulation that models the economic functions of a city, then that student has learned some important lessons about such an economy.