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.

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) and Agastya International Foundation are collaborating to create solutions that will bring innovative, high-quality and high-relevance learning and training to economically disadvantaged school children. The partners will jointly identify problems in the grassroots that can be addressed by solutions based on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), language technologies and computer vision. The objective is to enable those on the wrong side of the digital divide by leveraging cutting-edge research. The partnership is set up under the aegis of the Raj Reddy Centre on Technology in Service of Society at IIITH. This centre is an initiative of IIITH to enable research and emerging technology-led solutions for grassroot education and public health, with specific emphasis on the rural population.

The new BBC micro:bit'mini-computer' given to school children has been upgraded with AI and machine learning support, a new speaker and a microphone. It was launched in 2016 as part of the BBC'Make it Digital' campaign and four years later over five million have been used by schools and children around the world. The project is no longer run by the BBC, it was taken over by the Micro Bit Educational Foundation, a non-profit group setup to make coding more accessible. As well as a new microphone and speaker, that could be used for anything from listening out for doorbell sounds to playing back voice recordings, the device will include a touch sensor that could count how often a fly lands on a pad. The new BBC micro:bit'mini-computer' given to school children has been upgraded with AI and machine learning support, a new speaker and a microphone The palm-sized micro:bit was launched in 2016 as part of the BBC'Make it Digital' campaign and four years later over five million have been used by schools and children around the world Other new sensors on the device including light, magnetism and temperature, to create a wider range of applications.

Google's new drone delivery service Wing will help bring library books to school children in Christiansburg, Virginia to help make up for the city's library closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new initiative is being overseen by Kelly Passek, a librarian for Montgomery County Public Schools, who first pitched the idea to Wing. Students in Christiansburg can submit a request for books in the school district's library system and Passek will pull the book from the stacks and send it out in one of Wing's custom delivery containers. Google's Wing drone delivery service will now bring library books to school children in Christiansburg, Virginia'I think kids are going to be just thrilled to learn that they are going to be the first in the world to receive a library book by drone,' Passek told The Washington Post. Passek initially got the idea after wondering about how the 600-plus students in the school district were fairing after the county closed school campuses and libraries.

Alan Kay, Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway, and I had an article in the September 2019 issue of Communications called "Computational Thinking Should Just Be Good Thinking" (access the article at http://bit.ly/2P7RYEV). Our argument is that "computational thinking" is already here--students use computing every day, and that computing is undoubtedly influencing their thinking. What we really care about is effective, critical, "expanded" thinking, where computing helps us think. To do that, we need better computing. Ken Kahn engaged with our article in the comments section (thank you, Ken!), and he made a provocative comment: There are have been many successful attempts to add programming to games: Rocky's Boots (1982), Robot Odyssey (1984), RoboSport (1991), Minecraft (multiple extensions), and probably many more.

We're so excited to announce that world famous British astronaut and former International Space Station crew member, Tim Peake, will headline the Data Summit in Edinburgh as part of the UK's biggest data and artificial intelligence festival, DataFest. This year's key theme '#BeyondData' will focus on the impact data and AI has on the world and the future potential of the sector to help realise innovation across business and wider society, with a key focus on the challenges and opportunities data and AI presents. Now in its fourth year, DataFest has swiftly grown into a key calendar event for professionals working in the sector across the UK and further afield – attracting more than 4,000 visitors in 2019. The signing of Tim Peake marks our first major speaker announcement for the 2020 event, with more to follow in coming months. Famous for spending six months on the international space station, Tim completed approximately 3000 orbits of the earth, and covered a distance of 125 million kilometres.

Accenture Labs and Akshaya Patra Use Disruptive Technologies to Enhance Efficiency in Mid-Day Meal Program for School Children "Million Meals" project applied artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and blockchain to drive efficiency and timeliness of lunch program in government schools across India BENGALURU, India; Apr. 20, 2017 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Akshaya Patra, the world's largest NGO-run Mid-Day Meal Program, collaborated on an innovative project that used disruptive technologies to exponentially increase the number of meals served to children in schools in India that are run and aided by the government. The "Million Meals" project revolutionized Akshaya Patra's supply chain and operations, resulting in improved food quality and expanded service reach. Rooted in a vision to eliminate child hunger, the "Million Meals" project demonstrated how disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain can help address significant challenges in mass meal production and delivery. Accenture Labs, the research and development arm of Accenture, executed the project over a period of six months in Akshaya Patra's Bengaluru kitchen. An analysis of the project indicated a potential to improve efficiency by 20 percent, which could boost the number of meals served by millions.

OurCity is a site-specific digital artwork designed to solicit, aggregate and visualize citizens’ views on the cities in which they live. It aims to allow people to have their voice heard in a way which is fun and engaging and reduces the gap between citizens and policymakers. OurCity builds on our previous work, VoiceYourView (Whittle et al 2010) which used similar data aggregation techniques but a completely different visualization of user-generated data. This paper revisits the key results from VoiceYourView and hence uses OurCity as an additional validation exercise to assess whether VoiceYourView results are generalizable.