TIME Magazine's list of 100 inventions that will change and impact people's lives in 2020 also includes educational innovations for children. They may be on your Christmas or New Year's gift list for your kids!
This article is about THE BEST INVENTIONS OF 2020 - Education
1. A High-Tech Tutor, Van Robotics ABii
Buy a gift for kids: Van Robotics ABii
Robots fascinate Van Robotics CEO Laura Boccanfuso. But while getting her Ph.D. in computer science, she felt most were too expensive and technical for real-life applications. So she developed ABii, a robot tutor aimed at closing the math and reading proficiency gap for K-5 students. This is no mere toy: the 16-by-8-in. The device is designed to work with teachers—and, increasingly, parents now that so many children are learning from home—with a curriculum created by certified educators. Its edge: using a camera to detect changes in student attention and optimizing its tutoring approach to resonate with individual learners. “Schools more than ever need individualized learning help,” Boccanfuso says. “[They] don’t have enough teachers in the classroom.” Schools that buy ABii for $999 receive 30 student licenses that come with lesson plans that are updated regularly to meet national standards; the home version ($599) offers the same features with just three licenses.
—Nadia Suleman
2. Fun with Phonics, Duolingo ABC
Duolingo transformed our phones into language-learning devices. Now, with Duolingo ABC, the company is tackling a fresh challenge: childhood literacy. The new app is like an interactive Sesame Street segment that teaches kids the basics of reading with fun and simple lessons. “By taking everything we know about how people learn—and especially what we know about how to keep learners motivated with gamification—we believe we can help make a dent in global illiteracy rates,” says Laura Shih, the company’s senior product manager.
—Matthew Gault
3. Affordable Higher Ed, Outlier.org
Even before COVID-19 made campuses physically risky, higher education faced a serious crisis, largely because of debt—total student-loan debt hit a staggering $1.5 trillion in 2019. Less expensive online learning is one solution, but the quality of web-based schools has been spotty at best. Enter Outlier. Built by the people behind the online- learning platform MasterClass, Outlier offers remote college courses for credit through the University of Pittsburgh. The courses—which include calculus, astronomy, psychology, and statistics—are taught by top professors from schools like Yale and NYU, and are made with high production values not usually seen in online education.
—Matthew Gault
4. Learning Through Play, Kiri Toys
Buy a gift for kids: Kiri Toys
For centuries, children managed to entertain themselves with simple toys like wooden blocks—but times have changed. “Kids now spend between four and six hours per day in front of screens, which has only been exacerbated during COVID,” says Nick Porfilio, CEO of Kiri Toys, which manufactures a new kind of toy block aimed at screen- exhausted families. Designed to teach a range of skills to kids ages 1 and up, each kit contains a set of tiles printed with images that interact with the Kiri block through an RFID chip. Place the block atop a tile’s color ful, kid- friendly illustration, and it will pronounce the associated word while giving off a pleasant glow. Kits are available for preorder starting at $99.
—Matthew Gault
