Games have always been an important part of the Christmas experience – whether we like it or not. Back in the middle ages, households gathered together in the bleak midwinter to play versions of blind man's buff and truth or dare; Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was inspired by a game played in aristocratic households where the masters and servants swapped roles for a night on the last day of Christmas. The Victorians were famous for their parlour games with charades and twenty questions as important to the 19th century experience of Christmas as roasted goose and rampant diphtheria. During my own childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, board games ruled the festive period. Frankly, was it even Christmas until someone (me) flipped the dining room table during a particularly sociopathic game of Monopoly?

In this time of quarantine and isolation, we all need to keep up both our social interactions and our spirits. Playing video games with friends online is the perfect solution. You don't have to be good at them, that's not the point – online games provide a location to meet up, chat and have experiences together that may or may not involve blowing stuff up. Here is a range of titles that can be learned and enjoyed by both complete beginners and veteran gamers. Whether you have an old laptop or the latest smartphone, there's something here you can play with pals even if they're far away.

Wow, educational toys have changed a lot since I was a kid. I remember inserting floppy disks (!) into a computer in order to play classic games like "Number Munchers" and "The Oregon Trail". I learned very quickly that "Dog" was not a day of the week, and that it was very easy to die of wasting diseases in the western US in the 19th century. As the world becomes more and more digitally inclined, parents and teachers alike want toys that teach kids computer-and technology-related skills, both for their future employability and for being a citizen in a society built on 1's and 0's. One emerging trend is toys that teach kids how to write computer programming code. Coding is becoming essential knowledge because the world runs on computers, and computers themselves run on code. As a person with a degree in a STEM field, I had to learn how to code later in life, and it was a miserably long learning curve (even if it's one of my favorite things to do now).

Last week, i took the train in direction of Toulouse(France). It was the first time for 2 years that i have not been in this town since i finished my studies here and found a job in another town. But, i was there this time as speaker at DevFestToulouse 2017 edition . My Keynote was about « Physics laws & Big Data » . I tried to explain to attendees that as Physics is the science of nature ( word etymology), the principles discovered by physicians & scientific methods that they used could be potentially be useful for Big Data projects.