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Girls Who Code gets a Disney Imagineering boost
The room is a raw warehouse space that is partitioned off with curtains, hiding the bulk of it from view. I’m at the back of a group of girls who is nervously dropping its phones into a plastic box for safekeeping, to be returned on exit. The reason for the curtains, and the no phone policy, is that we are about to be some of the first people outside of the Disney Imagineering group to… Read More
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Springboard raises $9.5M to offer an online alternative to the master’s degree
Springboard is a platform that helps people advance their tech skills, and ultimately career. Today it took a step further to realizing its own potential after it landed a $9.5 million Series A round to develop specialisms. I wrote about the U.S.-based service nearly two years ago when it was just starting out and it had gobbled up a $1.7 million seed round. Then, Springboard had brought… Read More
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Lyft partners with Guild Education to offer drivers tuition discounts
Lyft is going to start offering its drivers access to college advising and tuition discounts for classes, certificates and degrees through Guild Education. The discounts for Lyft drivers will range between five to 20 percent off, with the average Lyft driver working to earn a degree saving $4,220 per year. The majority of Lyft drivers are part-time, with 93 percent driving less than 20 hours… Read More
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Crunch Network
Education technology meets its limits
Developing skills-based online courses and credentials is the easy part. The hard part is getting employers to pay attention. Read More
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Danny Masterson is out at Netflix’s ‘The Ranch’ following rape allegations
A day after Netflix announced that it will resume production on House of Cards without star Kevin Spacey, the streaming service has dropped another cast member from an original series amid sexual misconduct accusations. A spokesperson for the streaming service confirmed today that Danny Masterson has been dropped from its comedy series, The Ranch, after four women have accused the actor of… Read More
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Sheryl Sandberg says we need equal access to computer science education
At today’s Computer Science Education Week kickoff, the theme was women in coding. In the U.S., just 18 percent of computer science college graduates are women. Tech leaders like Microsoft’s Peggy Johnson, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki took to the stage to discuss the importance of getting young girls involved in technology. Read More
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Code.org raises $12 million from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others
Code.org, the non-profit organization that aims to increase access to computer science education, has raised $12 million in philanthropic funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Infosys Foundation USA and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The announcement came as part of a Computer Science Education Week kickoff event in San Mateo. Meanwhile, eight states, 76 school districts and 102… Read More
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Nexto replaces boring audio guides with tourism games
What if you could play with landmarks instead of just touring them? Nexto is turning audio guides into games to make sightseeing more interactive. Launching today as part of TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin‘s Battlefield competition, Nexto is partnering with tourist destinations to help them attract more visitors and earn more money to fund culture. “We wanted to make heritage more… Read More
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20 critical startup truths no one will tell you
Some knowledge is so important, everyone assumes everyone already knows it. But they don’t, especially in the tech world where things move so fast that most people are faking. But Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie spends his time helping the payment platform’s startup customers survive, and now he’s laid out 20 crucial learnings everyone should read. Click or scroll through… Read More
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AltSchool wants to change how kids learn, but fears have surfaced that it’s failing students
Business Insider recently reported that numerous families have grown frustrated with the education their children are receiving at AltSchool, an ambitious San Francisco-based edtech company that four years ago began opening physical grade schools and promising a personalized learning approach that would far surpass the standardized education most kids receive. Read More
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17 STEM-focused gifts to inspire kids to learn coding and love robotics
This year’s STEM gift guide reflects the boom in ‘educational’ techie toys — featuring programmable and controllable robots of all stripes and shapes, as well as some fully fledged learn-to-code computers and a few lower tech alternatives for variety. Read More
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Pip is a retro games console for kids to learn coding
Another UK startup is using Pi electronics as the foundation for an edtech business idea, and Kickstarter to try to crowdfund their product: A learn-to-code retro games console. Read More
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Duolingo can now help you learn Chinese
Earlier this year, Duolingo launched its Japanese course, which marked the first time the popular language learning service offered support for an Asian language. Since then, it’s also launched support for Korean and starting today, you can use the services mobile and web apps to learn Chinese (or, to be more precise, Modern Standard Mandarin), too. The company notes that a Chinese… Read More
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Facebook will teach the unemployed digital/social media skills in 30 cities
Facebook today announced Community Boost. Facebook tells me it’s investing tens of millions of dollars into the program that will travel to 30 cities around the U.S. in 2018. It will teach digital job skills to the unemployed, internet literacy to those just getting online, startup methodology to entrepreneurs and customer growth to small business owners. Read More
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Shernaz Daver, the CMO who helped to turn around Udacity, is leaving the company
Shernaz Daver, the chief marketing officer for Udacity, who company founder Sebastian Thrun credits with architecting the company’s dramatic revitalization four years ago, is stepping down from her position with the company. Read More
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Founder Gym aims to help underrepresented startup founders build tech startups
Founder Gym, co-founded by Mandela Schumacher-Hodge and Gabriela Zamudio, is unveiling its online platform to support and train underrepresented founders building tech startups. Instead of describing it as a school, bootcamp or incubator, Founder Gym describes itself as a topical, four-week training program that covers topics like fundraising, pitching, user growth and problem validation. Read More
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How littleBits grew from side project to Star Wars
Like many of the most compelling startups, littleBits began life as a side-hustle — no expectations, no early push for venture capital. Just a bit of tinkering to pass the time. Ayah Bdeir was a recent MIT grad with a fellowship at New York City architecture design firm I-Beam when the seeds of the company first sprouted. Read More
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Smart toy startup Elemental Path introduces the STEMosaur, a robot kids can put together
Elemental Path has come a long way since it debuted its first Cognitoy at Disrupt in 2016. The smart toy maker debuted on Kickstarter with an IBM Watson-powered toy dinosaur kids could talk to. It’s now launching a whole new dino robot, the STEMosaur. The new dino looks similar to Elemental’s original smart toy but is now a translucent green and lets kids put it together and… Read More
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Palo Alto nonprofit Benetech wins a $42.5M Dept. of Education grant, a nod to founder Jim Fruchterman’s quest to help the blind
With one day left to go in the federal fiscal year, the department had renewed funding for a longstanding reading program for the disabled, and it had chosen Benetech for the third time to run the five-year, $42.5 million project. That meant Benetech could continue to operate Bookshare, which provides digitally materials to 500,000 students with reading disabilities, including blindness… Read More
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