Preschoolers

‘By analysing the digital behaviour of our users we’ve generated a profile as unique as a fingerprint,” says Lenny the chameleon, with a sinister mwah-ha ha in his voice, blue eyes intensifying into lasers. Lenny is a smirkingly evil tech genius dressed in a Steve Jobs polo neck and is the villain of this U certificate animation; it’s a movie aimed at really small kids, but with a wildly inappropriate plot. Like Black Mirror for preschoolers, it’s a tech dystopia involving the invention of a new virtual reality system…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The weird way Alabama’s embryo ruling takes on artificial wombs A ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court last week that frozen embryos count as children is sending “shock waves” through the fertility industry and stoking fears that in vitro fertilization is getting swept up into the abortion debate. The Alabama legal ruling is clearly…

Mariam, one of the mothers in the camp, has two girls, five and four years old, and her greatest wish is that they get an education. She herself stopped her schooling at the sixth grade. “Reading and writing,” she said through an interpreter, “is the most important thing in life.” A focus on resilience Sesame Street premiered in the United States in 1969 with a social mission born out of the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: to level the playing field for poor kids by bringing early…

The Movement with Early Numeracy intervention program utilizes storybooks and various sports equipment, such as balls. Credit: Pinja Jylänki In recent years, concerns have been raised about children and adolescents being less physically active and having weaker motor skills than previous generations. A further cause of concern is the decline of for instance mathematical and language skills, with an increasing number of…

Anna-Elisabeth Baumann (left) and Elizabeth Goldman with Nao and Cozmo. Credit: Anna-Elisabeth Baumann Who do children prefer to learn from? Previous research has shown that even infants can identify the best informant. But would preschoolers prefer learning from a competent robot over an incompetent human? According to a new paper…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Children who enter preschool with good vocabulary and attention skills do better in class, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Early Education and Development. …