More fourth-grade Japanese students play video games or mobile games on school days than children of the same age did nine years ago, a health ministry survey has shown. The rate came to 74.8% for children born in 2010, up from 65.2% in a similar survey conducted on children born in 2001 when they reached the age of 10. The health ministry conducted the latest survey last year on some 26,000 children born in 2010 and collected answers from 92% of them. Of the respondents, those who play games for less than an hour on school days accounted for 71.2% when they were first-grade students. But the proportion fell to 48.1% when they entered the fourth grade.

As summer slowly winds to a close and the first day of remote learning remains weeks away (for many of us, anyway), it's easy--way too easy--to let the kids go nuts on their iPads while the grown-ups toil at home. Luckily, Google Assistant has a new feature to help keep young ones from disappearing into their bean bags. Slated to roll out starting today in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and India, the new Family Bell feature lets you create bells that sound on your Google smart speakers and displays, just like the bells at school. For example, you can day "Hey Google, create a Family Bell" to set reminder bells for breakfast, the start of a virtual camp day, recess in the backyard, or dinner time. You can ask Google Assistant to set a Family Bell on recurring days of the week, and in specific rooms.

In one back room at Skyline High School, you can learn all you need to know about St. Vrain Valley School District. It's there that bins of materials sit next to past projects, exposing the district's DNA. Boxes holding glue, Popsicle sticks, tape, pipe cleaners, compasses, zip ties and rulers lie nestled inside a 6-foot-high, student-constructed rack. Behind the storage unit sits a rectangular wooden box stuffed with bicycle tires filled with Silly Putty to replicate human intestines. For that biomedical project, students had to create a probe and learn to maneuver it sight unseen from behind a curtain on the box's opening to procure a sample from the intestine/bike tire.