Kids, teens and smartphones continue to be a topic of concern for parents and educators, sometimes even kids themselves. NewTechKids tracks developments and expert opinion and is pleased to share some great insight: Magazine Article: No One Knows Exactly What Social Media is Doing to Teens (the Atlantic, June 13, 2023) "Late last month, the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory—a format reserved for public-health issues that demand the nation’s immediate attention. “Nearly every teenager

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Computer Science Education Week takes place next week, from December 9-15. It's a global annual program dedicated to inspiring K-12 students to take interest in computer science. In honour of this important Week, NewTechKids challenges parents, caretakers and teachers to take the plunge and explore computer science with children. Until schools make technological innovation, computer science, programming and robotics mandatory subjects, the adults active in the lives of children will have to take the lead

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Next month, NewTechKids will head to the United Arab Emirates to teach a week-long series of computer science workshops for primary school students. We'll be teaching kids ages 4-12 during the 2019 Sharjah Children's Reading Festival, an annual mega-event dedicated to learning, reading and discovery. Themes will include algorithms and algorithmic thinking, computer and programming logic, and rapid prototyping and best practises in the field of technology design. Students will come from a mix of

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Calling all trailblazer teachers! Do you want to join a community of primary school teachers from Dutch and international primary schools who will be among the first in the Netherlands to introduce computer science and computational thinking lessons in their schools? Stichting NewTechKids (NewTechKids' non-profit counterpart) is offering a select group of teachers the opportunity to attend a FREE teacher training program. (Normal price: 2000 euro plus 21% BTW per teacher.) Designed for teachers who

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Last week, NewTechKids became the subject of Wittenberg University's Project Week in Amsterdam. For five days, business students dove into NewTechKids' business model and selected a country where we could expand our business: curriculum, lesson plans and teacher training programs. (We discounted the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Finland, Australia and New Zealand as these countries already have thriving computer science education in place.) Their challenge: select a country, prove that computational thinking and computer

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Today, NewTechKids welcomed a brave little girl to our latest after-school bootcamp. Before she arrived, a large group of boys ranging from seven to nine bounded into the class, swapping stories about building LEGO, playing football and the mutual friends they all knew. When she peeked into the class, she realised that she was the only girl in a sea of boys. Our assistant teacher, who is female, tried to reassure her but the girl begged her mother to sit at

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On January 7, 2016, a major announcement was made in the U.S. Leading computer science experts and organisations are co-developing a framework to identify key computer science concepts and practices that all primary and secondary school students should learn. This comes after President Obama signed "Every Student Succeeds", a new U.S. education law, in early December 2015 which recognizes computer science as a ‘critical academic field’. Combined with the STEM Act of 2015, this new law will make federal funding

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NewTechKids is proud to share our report of the EU Code Week 2015 teacher training pilot program we organised in September and October 2015. We partnered with TomTom, the Dutch technology company, to launch a pilot program aimed at creating a scaling model for technology education in primary schools. Specifically, this model engaged both primary school teachers and students around computational thinking and coding. NewTechKids trained 75 primary school teachers from schools in Amsterdam and

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