Education

Ontario Could Soon Require Anti-Vaxxer Parents to Attend a Science Class

In an effort to curb the dangerous trend of vaccine avoidance, the Liberal government in Ontario wants parents seeking vaccine exemptions for their kids to attend a mandatory education session. It’s a good idea, but getting anti-vaxxers to change their opinions will probably require more than that. The Liberals in Ontario are pursuing an amendment…

This Adorable Robot Can Help Children to Program

Getting kids to code is a great idea—but it’s not always easy. Now a team of researchers from Harvard has developed this little robot, called Root, that’s designed to make writing code a more tangible experience. Wired reports that that the team from the Wyss Institute at Harvard has been working on the project for…

Lucky High School Students Are Getting XKCD In Their Textbooks

Randall Monroe’s XKCD does a stellar job of explaining scientific concepts while also making people laugh. So, it makes a surprising amount of sense for those comics to find their way into high school textbooks. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has agreed a deal to use pages from Monroe’s latest book, The Thing Explainer, which explains…

Even Tim Cook’s Old High School Has Stopped Giving Its Students MacBooks

Tim Cook is a graduate of Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama. Until last month, it and other schools in the area provided MacBooks for teachers and students in grades three through 12; younger kids were given iPads. Recently, however, the district decided to stop giving its students the merchandise of its most famous alumna.…

Anyone, Anywhere Can Sign Up For This Free Online Course on Comic Books

The California College of the Arts is one of very few schools to offer an MFA in Comics. But if you’re just starting to make your own comics—or perhaps not quite ready to commit to a degree program—here’s a rad opportunity that anyone can take part in: a free online course that kicks off in…

Go Phoenixes! Plenty of colleges offer the occasional course on science fiction, but now at UW Green Bay, you can actually major in science fiction studies. Including making your own movie!

Thanks to Smartwatches, Major Universities Are Banning All Watches From Exams

Back in my day, schools used to recommend bringing a watch into tests so you’d keep track of the time. But now, the rise of smartwatches could lead to a flat-out ban of all timepieces for test-takers, if the latest rule at a major university in Japan is any indication. Kyoto University, one of Japan’s…

The Most Influential Universities, According to Wikipedia

There are many ways to judge the quality of a University: the results of its students, the research it produces, perhaps even the number of Nobel prizes it boasts. But how about using Wikipedia citations instead? That’s what a team of researchers from the University of Franche-Comte in France have done. In a paper published…

The UK Has Its Very First Professor of Comics

There are many university-level art and literature courses that revolve around the history and creation of comic books—but Lancaster University in England has just hired the first Professor in the country to specifically teach comics. And surprisingly, he has an even cooler title than “Professor of Comics” on his resume. Benoit Peeters, a French graphic…

Frustrated College Professors Launch Their Own Sex Ed MOOC 

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that high school sex education in the United States is an unholy mess. And as a result, an alarming number of students enter college with little knowledge about how their bodies work in terms of reproductive health. A team of Northwestern University professors led by Teresa Woodruff is addressing…

An AI Program in Japan Just Passed a College Entrance Exam

An artificial intelligence program received such high scores on a standardized test that it’d have an 80% chance of getting into a Japanese university. The Wall Street Journal reports that the program, developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, took a multi-subject college entrance exam and passed with an above-average score of 511 points out…

Scientists Built This Molecular Playground in Minecraft to Teach Kids Chemistry

Minecraft welcomes millions of young players every day and is home to all kinds of nerdery. Now, a team of chemists hope to bring the two together by helping children take their first blocky steps into the world of biochemistry inside the virtual building environment. Researchers from the University of Hull in the UK have…

State laws in the US can set rules for a sex education classroom, but the actual quality of the instruction depends on what happens at the local level. Aaron Yarmuth’s article in Louisville’s LeoWeekly looks at one way a comprehensive sex ed class can thread that needle. Check it out! Contact the author at [email protected].

On Swedish TV, Dancing Tampons Teach Kids About Menstruation 

Sweden has found a way to avoid those awkward boys-in-the-gym, girls-in-the-lunchroom fifth grade lessons about menstruation and basic genital anatomy: making videos with catchy songs for children’s television. Their latest film features marionettes made of tampons and lyrics that stress that menstruation is completely normal. According to Swedish paper The Local, it will air today…

Here’s Your Last Chance to Take the Throb Sex Education Survey

You heard about the survey, and you wanted to click in and tell us about the sex education you got in high school, but it just wasn’t a good time. You decided you’d get to it later. And the time just got away from you. I’m here to remind you: this is your last chance.…

The LA School System’s $1.3 Billion iPad Fiasco Comes to a Sad End 

An iPad for every kid! It sounded like a good idea in 2013, but a $1.3 billion plan to supply Los Angeles schools with Apple tablets turned into a failure quagmire, with the school district asking for a refund. The end of the saga: LA’s Unified School System will receive a $6.4 million settlement from…

There’s Still Time to Take the Throb Sex Education Survey

We opened Throb’s sex education survey two weeks ago: it’s our attempt to collect data that can help us make sense of the United States’ district-by-district patchwork of coursework and requirements. So far, nearly 14,000 of you have told us what your high schools did for sex ed. If you want to help out, but…

Your Sex Education Data Sucks

The way we teach sex education in the United States is such a crazy-quilt of curricula that it’s hard to know what’s being taught to our high school students, or how accurately. And when we lack that kind of data, we can easily make some pretty terrible mistakes. Take, for example, Hannah Smothers’ article in…

Evolution and Climate Change to Be Taught in Alabama Classrooms

Starting next year, students in Alabama will be required to learn about evolution and climate change—a move that upends the state’s decade-old science standards. As reported in the Associated Press, public school students will be required to understand the theory of evolution, along with the rudiments of climate change, which wasn’t set as a science…

Tell Us What Sex Ed in the United States Is Really Like 

It’s hard to talk about sex education in the United States. Not just because conservative protesters try to prevent their local schools from teaching it, but because–as John Oliver pointed out last month in a spot-on segment of Last Week Tonight–lesson plans in US schools are wildly inconsistent, varying dramatically from one school district to…