Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series All of Apple's laptops are excellent. But if you're not sure which model is right for you, I can offer some buying guidance. Haley Henschel is a Chicago-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable who reviews and finds deals on popular tech, from laptops to gaming consoles and VPNs. She has years of experience covering shopping holidays and can tell you what's actually worth buying on Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day. Her work has also explored the driving forces behind digital trends within the shopping sphere, from dupes to 12-foot skeletons . All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. MacBooks have been ridiculously easy to recommend since we first started reviewing them in the mid-2010s, but since Apple rolled out its first M-series chips in 2020.

Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series MacBook Neo vs. MacBook Air (M5): Which Apple laptop is better for you? The Neo makes some big spec trade-offs to undercut the Air by $600. But how much RAM do you really need, anyway? Haley Henschel is a Chicago-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable who reviews and finds deals on popular tech, from laptops to gaming consoles and VPNs. She has years of experience covering shopping holidays and can tell you what's actually worth buying on Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day.

Education is on the verge of becoming fully automated. William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. "I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school," he said.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Critics have long warned that too much television rots your brain, but new evidence suggests at least time in front of the tube may actually benefit your mental health . In a study published in the, researchers combined their own investigations into leisure time with information from the United States Census Bureau on household size, stress levels, and screen usage. People who take some "Me Time" at home after work appear to have an easier time bouncing back to their daily responsibilities. "Household size is really about how many demands a person experiences when they go home," Soo Min Toh, a behaviorist at the University of Toronto Mississauga and study co-author, said in a university profile .

College students often face academic and life stressors affecting productivity, especially students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) who experience executive functioning challenges. Conventional productivity tools typically demand sustained self-discipline and consistent use, which many students struggle with, leading to disruptive app-switching behaviors. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs), known for their intuitive and interactive nature, offer promising potential to support productivity in academic environments, having been successfully utilized in domains like education, cognitive development, and mental health. To leverage SARs effectively in addressing student productivity, this study employed a Participatory Design (PD) approach, directly involving college students and a Student Success and Well-Being Coach in the design process. Through interviews and a collaborative workshop, we gathered detailed insights on productivity challenges and identified desirable features for a productivity-focused SAR. Importantly, ethical considerations were integrated from the onset, facilitating responsible and user-aligned design choices. Our contributions include comprehensive insights into student productivity challenges, SAR design preferences, and actionable recommendations for effective robot characteristics. Additionally, we present stakeholder-derived ethical guidelines to inform responsible future implementations of productivity-focused SARs in higher education.

College students often face academic challenges that hamper their productivity and well-being. Although self-help books and productivity apps are popular, they often fall short. Books provide generalized, non-interactive guidance, and apps are not inherently educational and can hinder the development of key organizational skills. Traditional productivity coaching offers personalized support, but is resource-intensive and difficult to scale. In this study, we present a proof-of-concept for a socially assistive robot (SAR) as an educational coach and a potential solution to the limitations of existing productivity tools and coaching approaches. The SAR delivers six different lessons on time management and task prioritization. Users interact via a chat interface, while the SAR responds through speech (with a toggle option). An integrated dashboard monitors progress, mood, engagement, confidence per lesson, and time spent per lesson. It also offers personalized productivity insights to foster reflection and self-awareness. We evaluated the system with 15 college students, achieving a System Usability Score of 79.2 and high ratings for overall experience and engagement. Our findings suggest that SAR-based productivity coaching can offer an effective and scalable solution to improve productivity among college students.

In his newly translated memoir, Hu Anyan captures the brutal labor and quiet grace of life at the edge of China's booming ecommerce industry. "Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning," writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book . "I sweated so much I never once needed to pee." This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside--except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar. Hu's writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he's now a prolific, established author in the country.

Abstract-- While the efficacy of social robots in supporting people in learning tasks has been extensively investigated, their potential impact in assisting students in self-studying contexts has not been investigated much. This study explores how a social robot can act as a peer study companion for college students during self-study tasks by delivering task-oriented goal reminder and positive emotional support. We conducted an exploratory Wizard-of-Oz study to explore how these robotic support behaviors impacted students' perceived focus, productivity, and engagement in comparison to a robot that only provided physical presence (control). Our study results suggest that participants in the goal reminder and the emotional support conditions reported greater ease of use, with the goal reminder condition additionally showing a higher willingness to use the robot in future study sessions. Participants' satisfaction with the robot was correlated with their perception of the robot as a social other, and this perception was found to be a predictor for their level of goal achievement in the self-study task. These findings highlight the potential of socially assistive robots to support self-study through both functional and emotional engagement. Peer relationships in educational settings play a crucial role in generating relatedness and support that are influential in fostering academic success [1]-[4]. Peer support is shown to positively impact students' learning by fostering a sense of connectedness, which enhances productivity, academic performance, and study well-being [1], [3], [5], [6].

Thinking about science and technology in terms of return on investment misses the point. Here's what kids really need to know. That's what led me to become a professor. As a high school student, one of my major life goals was to figure out how to build an actual light sword. Doing so is all but impossible, so it didn't really matter if I went into engineering or science, but I pursued STEM just the same.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. What counts as cheating with AI? Teachers are grappling with how to draw the line This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Teachers say AI cheating is "off the charts," but research shows cheating rates remain unchanged since before ChatGPT. Schools favor "AI literacy" and redesigning assignments to encourage ethical technology use.