Experts have raised questions about whether an app-based curriculum can serve all learners equally. Experts have raised questions about whether an app-based curriculum can serve all learners equally. Inside San Francisco's new AI school: is this the future of US education? In the world's tech innovation epicenter, an "AI-powered" private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology. Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly permeating classrooms worldwide, yet its adoption in schools of developing countries remains under-explored. This paper investigates AI adoption, usage patterns, and perceived impact in Pakistani K-12 schools based on a survey of 125 educators. The questionnaire covered educator's familiarity with AI, frequency and modes of use, and attitudes toward AI's benefits and challenges. Results reveal a generally positive disposition towards AI: over two-thirds of teachers expressed willingness to adopt AI tools given proper support and many have begun integrating AI for lesson planning and content creation. However, AI usage is uneven - while about one-third of respondents actively use AI tools frequently, others remain occasional users. Content generation emerged as the most common AI application, whereas AI-driven grading and feedback are rarely used. Teachers reported moderate improvements in student engagement and efficiency due to AI, but also voiced concerns about equitable access. These findings highlight both the enthusiasm for AI's potential in Pakistan's schools and the need for training and infrastructure to ensure inclusive and effective implementation.

Alpha School co-founder Mackenzie Price and a junior at the school Elle Kristine join'Fox & Friends' to discuss the benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence into the classroom. At a time when many American students are struggling to keep up, a private school in Texas is doing more with less, much less. At Alpha School, students spend just two hours a day in class, guided by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tutor. But results are impressive: students are testing in the top 1 to 2% nationally. "We use an AI tutor and adaptive apps to provide a completely personalized learning experience," said Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price during an interview on Fox & Friends.

President Donald Trump, winner of the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania 23, has maintained close ties with Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, for decades. During the President's first term, she served for two years as head of the Small Business Administration, stepping down in 2019 to lead America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. Now McMahon is Trump's nominee to run the U.S. Department of Education, although she may appear to lack conventional bona fides for the position. If McMahon is confirmed by the Senate, her odd task will be to take charge of an agency in order to euthanize it. "I told Linda, 'Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,' " Trump said, on February 4th.

I'm taking over TechScape from Alex Hern, and I'd like to introduce myself and my ideas for this newsletter. A bit about me: I started working at the Guardian the day Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial. My first holiday from my new job coincided with the shock firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI. The story I tell over and over again at parties is the one about how I was arrested and jailed while reporting a story on deadly testicular injections. We'll dissect the significance of the week's most substantial tech news, investigate odd niches, catch you up on the best of the Guardian's reporting and offer a helpful tip now and then.

Achievement tests for elementary and junior high school children across Japan showed no correlation between the percentages of correct answers and the lengths of coronavirus school closures, education ministry data showed Tuesday. Gaps in the average percentages of correct answers between the prefectures were also small. The tests for elementary school sixth-graders and junior high school third-graders were carried out in May after the cancellation last year due to blanket school closures triggered by the COVID-19 crisis. The tests measured achievement in Japanese language and arithmetic for elementary school students and in Japanese and mathematics for junior high school students. Some 1.97 million students at about 29,000 public and private schools participated, covering almost all public schools and about half of private schools in Japan.

Spatial joins allow to augment one spatial dataset with information from another spatial dataset by linking overlapping features. In this post I will provide an example showing how to augment a dataset containing school locations with socioeconomic data of their surrounding statistical region using R and the package sf (Pebesma 2018). This approach has the drawback that the surrounding statistical region doesn't reflect the actual catchment area of the school. I will present an alternative approach where the overlaps of the schools' catchment areas with the statistical regions allow to calculate the weighted average of the socioeconomic statistics. If we have no data about the actual catchment areas of the schools, we may resort to approximating these areas as circular regions or as Voronoi regions around schools.

When the pandemic put the world on pause and we retreated to our living rooms, video games gave us a horizon to head towards when in reality we had nowhere to go. But, as the most recent UK games industry census showed, the people who make those video game landscapes all tend to look alike: 70% of the game development workforce is male, and just 10% are BAME. This creates a sort of gaming Stepford – miles and miles of video game real estate where characters and stories are almost identical to the ones that came before, because the architects all look the same and want the same things. The survey showed that 81% of people in the UK games industry are educated to at least undergraduate level, which is considerably higher than the 57% average for other creative industries. Meanwhile, 62% of those in British games studios grew up in households where the main earner worked in a professional or managerial role.

After Covid-19 impeded schools from operating and examining regularly, the UK Department of Education attempted to grade students' A-level and GCSE exams with a third-party machine learning algorithm. Britain's A-levels largely determine students' chances to attend higher education and thus have life-long consequences. The applied algorithm predicted students' grades based on their individual performance in earlier -- and somewhat irrelevant and deviating -- mock exams as well as on their school's relative performance to others in the previous year. Many critics labeled this approach as inaccurate and unfair, resulting in significant downgrading and favoring private schools. In fact, over 40% of students received lower grades than predicted by their teachers, compared to only 2% whose scores improved (Heaven, 2020).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has given us a unique opportunity to perfectly understand the modern Democrats' belief in aristocratic superiority. The California Democrat's recent hypocrisy in going to her hair salon, which was supposed to be shut down due to San Francisco's stringent (and Pelosi-supported) COVID-19 rules, is just one more example of Democratic members of the political aristocracy believing they are superior to citizens (the opposite of the founding premise of America). The American people have long resented the hypocrisy and arrogance by which a political aristocracy believes one set of rules applies to the public and a totally different set of rules applies to its interests and its family members. We knew that this double standard deeply offended most Americans in 1994. That is why the first commitment of the Contract with America was to "require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress."