I'd like to see a challenge to help educators learn how to teach. There's a lot of variation yet our primary education model is still one teacher presenting material in one way to 20-30 kids.
I believe one of the goals for Khan Academy in schools is to reverse teaching and homework, so that students watch videos at home and does homework under teacher supervision in school.
Some of my daughters' classes are like that. That's a pretty minor change and doesn't really alter the model of "everybody learn this the same way at the same rate".
Are there any details about what they actually do? This is just a sign up form with the claim that they reward "hustling."
"Hustle" in LearnStorm is intended to reward productive persistence in learning how to tackle a new math skill. We don't go into the details of how we measure that because we want the kids to just do the challenge as they naturally would.
It looks like it's just a scoreboard on top of the existing Khan Academy.
The leaderboards are built on top of Khan Academy infrastructure, but the "hustle" calculation is not reflected (or computed, for that matter) anywhere else on Khan Academy.
I feel like the gamification of education is a double edged sword. It can get rather cheesy and I imagine it would turn some kids off to learning, as I was from some of the videos / workbooks / whatever I was exposed to in middle school.
I'd be interested in how effective these approaches are. My faith is in Khan Academy though, amazing work they're doing.
Does anyone know why this is region based? I'm about 40 miles outside of the Bay Area range that they include and my 4th grader would love it.
It's region based because there are in-person events and effort that goes in to getting kids signed up. We also have regional sponsors that help provide prizes and make the events great.
Any reason why these regions in particular? Seems very rando. Maybe focus on areas with problems teaching math?
These are regions in which we were able to get sponsors, school district support, etc.
Any plans to include other areas?
The regions are set for 2016. We may expand in 2017