Globally, we are becoming digitally advanced and moving towards a connected future. Technology evolves at a rapid pace and its dynamism cannot be curtailed. Our dear friend ‘Elon Musk’ is revolutionizing the way technology plays a role in ‘space travel’ & ‘robotics’ thereby proving that ‘anything is possible with the correct use of technology’. Before we say goodbye to 2022, let us learn some of the cool tech trends that are shaping our lives & making the world a better place to live in.

#1 Blockchain

Information is ‘the most’ important aspect for carrying out business and running smooth operations. Therefore, companies need access to accurate information in real-time, to be able to take important decisions and make plans for the future. Blockchain is like a digital ledger that stores information and makes it available whenever needed. By accessing blockchain, one can get transparent and reliable data related to; business orders placed by clients, payment schedules, accounts, the scale of production, etc. Basically, it automates the process of having to manage huge amounts of data manually, and that-to error-free without any scope for duplication. Blockchain is exciting and without even us realizing it, we reap the benefits of Blockchain in our everyday lives. Blockchain is used for fast money transfers by banks & also eliminates the need for intervention by a third party. Our mobile ‘wallets’ like Google Pay make cashless transactions possible and also reward customers for their loyalty.

#2 5G

5G (fifth generation) wireless is currently the most advanced mobile broadband technology standard in the world. The 5G download speed can reach 10 gigabits per second and is attributed to be 100 times faster than the previously used 4G network. One can access files, videos, and programs without any waiting time due to its almost zero-latency promise and higher execution capacity. This means that 5G is a trustworthy network that clearly ticks all boxes when it comes to speed, security, coverage, & exponential capacity. Private organizations, government services, and multinational conglomerates today rely on 5G data to conduct their business and service customers across the globe. Even high-demanding jobs in sectors such as; manufacturing, healthcare, and energy transmission that require utmost precision & where every milli-second counts, can comfortably rely on 5G connectivity. Fun fact, did you know; UAE is amongst the world’s fastest countries in deploying 5G networks?

#3 Virtual Reality (VR)

Virtual Reality is used in different industries to train their staff and get employees ready to handle highly-skilled jobs. In the medical field, the simulators create a 3D scenario of a patient on whom a critical operation needs to be performed, and the trainee surgeon gets to practice step-by-step operation without putting the patient at risk. VR can also be used to train military armed forces by creating different war-zone-like scenarios, thereby preparing them to tackle any enemy attack that they may have to combat. Even the education sector is making utmost use of VR to excite students and transport them to any country or region across the globe to study landscapes, observe monuments, and learn about its topography. Dubai is pretty tech-savvy and most schools encourage students to participate in simulated environments to foster their creativity.

The comprehensive computer curriculum by TechnoKids is supporting this VR revolution and therefore introduced the TechnoMinds module. Using remote control programming, children can experience VR and all that it has to offer. TechnoKids is adopted by K12 schools world-over, including those in GCC regions in the Middle East.

#4 Edge Computing

We have heard the term Cloud Computing, but what is Edge Computing? Cloud Computing became popular in 2010 and now Edge Computing has taken over in 2022. It is one level advanced to Cloud Computing and assumes more reliable & efficient processing. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology extensively makes use of Edge Computing phenomena. Basically, Edge distributes the computing framework and brings enterprise applications closer to data sources, such as IoT devices or local edge servers. This proximity to data to its source can benefit by providing faster insights, improved response, and stronger bandwidth availability.

Contact us

Robotics competitions are the new trend and students from across nations are invited to participate to flaunt their Coding Skills. Middle-school & secondary graders are invited to solve some engineering problems and showcase their ingenuity at such competitions that take place in GCC regions, including UAE. Some of these events allow students to select their topics, while others have a theme that needs to be kept in mind while submitting the final project entries. Such competitions prepare students to be NextGen designers, engineers, and builders, with a passion to raise to challenges & find innovative solutions.

Here are some tips that will help you prepare in advance for the competition:

1. Get to know your teammates well. A good team has a mix of members who demonstrate different capabilities. Someone may be proficient at preparing a plan and the other may excel at executing the project. So, learn each teammate’s strengths and weaknesses, well in advance.
2. Practice using the tools and Robotic kits that you would have to make use of at the competition. Every participant needs to be acquainted with the toolkit so that there is no panic at the end moment. Experiment with building a variety of Robots using the toolkit, well in advance before the competition date.
3. Involve your team in virtual simulator games so that you can estimate each member’s timing and aim to improve their speed of working. Robotify is an excellent virtual coding platform that allows students to practice coding without physically using hardware or any additional software. Robotify also has coding games like; Treasure Trove, Drone Park, Axel’s Mars Adventure, so that children don’t get bored while working with tricky Python codes! Robotify subscription is available to all students and its popularity is evident in Dubai & other UAE regions.
4. Create your own bugs while preparing for the contest, so that you can find out which teammate demonstrates the best ‘problem-solving’ abilities and entrust him the duty to guide everyone on competition day. Become friends with ‘common bugs’ such as; error in syntax and error in calculation, so that you know how to proceed further without panicking. But also, be prepared for unexpected surprises!
5. It is a great idea to approach a senior mentor or someone whose everyday job involves making Robots so that you can get some handy tips for extra advantage in the competition. Your mentor will provide you with guidance & direction, thereby mentoring your team to be more confident in completing the coding tasks.
6. Push your limits and don’t settle for less! Participating in the Robot competition could be a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity and your team needs to aim at winning the annual Robotics cup. Therefore, keep reworking your models until you are satisfied with the outcome. Power your Robot to challenge itself because there’s nothing that a Robot can’t be made to do.
7. Delegating responsibility is the basic fundamental of how an organization works. The success of any project is measured by the capacity of the team to put bits & pieces together to form a complete deliverable. If one member is entrusted with the duty of testing, the others should manage construction, drawing, and prototyping, so that the final model is robust enough to carry out its functions & does not falter at the time of presentation.
8. Practice your presentation to impress judges. Once you have your Robot ready, it comes to how you present it before your esteemed audiences. The panellists need to understand what value your Robot is adding and how is it better than the projects submitted by other teams. Practice your pitch in advance and choose the best communicator in the team to do the needful.

Contact us

Our 21st-century learners need to be creative, because we can witness today our world is gravitating towards creativity and one no more needs to be an Engineer or a Doctor to earn money. Creative professions are evolving, and many aspirants are treading this unconventional route by making vocation their full-time career opportunity. But that doesn’t mean that creativity can’t be applied to mainstream job opportunities.

Why Do We Need to Be Creative?

Creativity helps us solve problems more easily and be innovative. Creative people don’t have to strive so hard to generate novel ideas! When creative ideas are implemented, it leads to new product development or improves the way people work, maximizing efficiency.

Across all industries, ingenuity is highly appreciated, and companies prefer to hire talented individuals who have proved their worth by accomplishing something with their creative skills.

Here are some facts that will help strengthen your resolve towards opting to develop your creative skills even further;

• Creativity helps you to process what you are learning in school or at work in a shorter span, such that the learning process is faster & more efficient.
• It helps broaden your horizons by using alternate ways of thinking.
• We know that each one of us is unique! Creativity helps you discover your uniqueness so that you can shine in this world & do great things.
• Creativity keeps you motivated and instills confidence to prove your worth.
• It even breaks the mundaneness and sparks joy & positivity within the individual.

Coding can lead to Creativity

Does coding have to do anything with creativity? Can a preschooler find his ‘eye for creativity’ by learning to code? According to stats, it is proved that 58% of students in grades 6-8 were able to develop their creative skills, just by taking-up coding classes. With the STEAM curriculum being fully integrated into schools across the globe including Dubai, coding has become like just another subject.

Coding a robot sounds fun, doesn’t it? Coding also helps build cool things such as gaming apps, virtual simulators, interactive websites, and other cool stuff that we use extensively today.

Our friend ‘Alexa’ was invented with coding capabilities and creative intelligence; to help us stream music & manage our daily schedules more effectively. Like a family member, she never falters to remind us of ‘play dates’ or ‘important meetings.

The above points prove that coding needs some level of creativity, and by practicing to code we can further explore our creative talents & use it in other areas of our lives.

Learning to Code Artistically

When children enter preschool, they are naturally curious and find ways to discover the world around them. Introducing coding at this phase of their lives proves beneficial as kids then grow-up liking the subject even more and simultaneously discovering their creative skills. Matatalab provides a holistic screenless coding platform for children of ages 4 and up to foster talent. Their hands-on coding sets available in UAE are amusing and keep children engaged for a long time. The MatataBot can do different things; including making art! Yes, children can use arrow keys to navigate the Bot and make some wonderful art on paper.

So, use your imagination and command the MatataBot to create scenes, design shapes, and bring your imagination to life.

Gone are those days when budding artists needed to draw & sketch themselves! It is now possible to make art via a Robot. The Matatalab Sets are available for sale in GCC & across the Middle East by simply reaching out to us.

Some schools even host Art Competitions by allowing kids to use MataBots and challenge them to conquer different levels, by expecting more sophisticated & complex artworks. Afterall, the right coding Robot opens up a world of creativity for your child.

Contact us

Reading, writing, and communicating effortlessly are life-nurturing skills. Your child will develop these skills if they get into the habit of reading in their growing years. It has countless advantages, mainly that uplifts their grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling, thereby making them super confident. This entire learning process of reading and mastering spelling goes hand in hand. When children get a grip on spellings, they will be motivated to read even more fluently and hence we say this is correlated. We have mentioned a few activities below that will help your children memorize spellings the fun way.

Break Down Words and Sound Them

This is a simple yet the most constructive exercise. Every time there is a new word, big or small, make sure you break it down for your child and while the word is broken into syllables, do sound them out, thus making it easier for them to remember the spelling and then they will be able to pronounce the entire word correctly in one go.

Use Pictures

Visual representations always work well with children. Where in certain cases it may be difficult to memorize text straight away but they will definitely remember the picture associated with the word. So, whenever your child gets confused with certain spellings, make sure you explain with some reference image.

Sing Rhymes

Melodies have lasting memories. Teach your children spellings through music. It may be rhymes or poems or action songs. Rhythms are effective, even if they forget the spelling, they will recall the letters and the word as per the tune

Emphasize Difficult Words

You may have time and again come across words that your children frequently struggle with. Once they have been identified, you must highlight such words and make your child write them down and make them understand the meaning of it. You can associate an example to remember with that word and then memorizing its spelling will become easier and the next time they read any text and come upon that word they will not stumble anymore.

Scramble Up Words

Jumbled-up words are great to teach spelling to children. Kids derive immense joy in solving the scrambled word and declaring the right spelling. Imagine jumbling up DUBAI to BAIDU, this way they will memorize spellings and learn words creatively. You can start with small words and proceed to bigger words and use common or proper nouns.

Conduct Word Search

Children and adults alike love solving word search puzzles. The letters grid is given and usually, there are about 10 to 15 words present in that grid to be found. The only difference is that the words are not scrambled like in the previous activity. The alphabets of the words are present in the correct order but words are either placed vertically, horizontally, or diagonally in the grid. The list of the words to be searched in the grid is given and every puzzle is based on a genre. So, in this way children are introduced to numerous words and are memorizing their spellings with a lot of thrill.

Play Scrabble

This is an all-time favorite family game not just in the Middle East but loved across generations around the world. Play scrabble with children while they are young. This board game is so exciting, that they would want to play a game anytime. The dictionary often comes to the rescue in this game when the players debate the spelling of certain words or even when they funnily argue whether a particular word exists in the dictionary or not. Calculation of the word formed to attain points is the high point of this game. Your child is learning fabulous words, knowing their spellings, and polishing Math too. It’s one game with tremendous benefits.

Quiz with Abbreviations

This is another fun task to undertake with your children. There are plenty of abbreviations to learn. Basically, your kids are learning the short form of a word or a phrase and simultaneously memorizing its spellings.

E.g. For Country – United Arab Emirates is abbreviated to UAE.

E.g. For Organisation – Gulf Co-operation Council is abbreviated to GCC

Reading Eggs makes the learning-to-read journey fun, interactive, and highly rewarding for ages 2-13, based on solid scientific research. They provide an educationally sound and highly enjoyable program that is effective and easy to integrate into your daily routine. Fast Phonics is an online synthetic program that helps children become strong readers. It includes 20 fun filled levels where children learn key phonics skills including letter sound recognition, blending, and spelling. Each level is a mountain peak covering one set of letters with several exciting activities.

Contact us

Do you need to be a proficient programmer to be able to get your children excited about coding? Well, the answer is no! Even though you might not be from an IT background or have any computer literacy knowledge, the need of the hour demands children to be capable of performing basic coding. Most organizations prefer hiring professionals who have some coding knowledge, versus those who have none at all.

This Blog is dedicated to all those parents who wish to be a guiding lamp to their children by steering them on the right path and encouraging kids to pursue coding as a hobby to start with, rather than burdening them with the pressure of having to study one more subject. Holding conversations can be powerful, so let us show you how to talk to your preschooler and middle-school goers to develop a liking for coding.

#1 Talk About the Benefits of Learning To Code

Children should be introduced to coding at an early age, as it is becoming one of the most important skills that one needs to have to make a successful career and understand the world around them better. The 21st century STEAM curriculum, which is used extensively across the globe & also in Dubai, gives parents all the more reason for encouraging children to practice coding.

Here’s what you can say to them;

• You will make many friends in coding class
• You will get to play games while learning to code
• On completion of the course, you will get a certificate
• Just as you learn English & Arabic languages, coding is another language
• One day you will be able to design & create your favorite App

2 Give Students Examples of What is Possible With Coding

Just as children get excited about learning to play soccer and taking-up classes to learn a new musical instrument, they need to feel excited about learning to code. How will you do this? Children naturally love to watch videos on YouTube, so explain to them in simple words, ‘you know, this platform was made by 3 former PayPal employees who were software developers namely; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim’. Another fact; to target the tastes and preferences of local audiences, you can even change the language preference of your YouTube platform, from English – Arabic (for those who reside in the Middle East) just by clicking on the settings button!

Also add that, Java Script was the language used as a base for constructing the YouTube platform and 98% of websites that we use today, have JavaScript language. This will get children intrigued about the different coding languages & enthuse them to know more. Who doesn’t like to play Candy Crush? But Candy Crush wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for some genius programmers right! Collecting candies is a rewarding experience, so level-up your coding game and pursue it as a passion, because, who knows one day you could become a famous Game App developer.

#3 Make Coding Tangible

Anything that one can see & touch, is easily believable! Rather than treating coding as an abstract concept, you must try to tangibilize it. So, introduce children to coding toys that have certain modules that give instructions to teach the player to ‘construct’ & build ‘robots’. It is advisable to purchase a set before enrolling your preschooler into any coding program, so as to give them a sneak-peek and a kind of induction into what they are going to experience when they attend coding class.

CodeMonkey is an award-winning online platform, that teaches teenagers & children real-life coding skills. You can learn block-based and text-based programming through a game-like environment. Millions of students have enrolled to the CodeMonkey course not only in US & UK, but also the UAE and found multifold benefits. The best part is, no prior experience is needed to be a CodeMonkey student, and one can rely on the fully guided lesson plans that come along with the set. These lessons keep advancing as the child becomes more proficient with his coding skills.

Contact us

The UAE’s largest online math competition is here! Students can finally start honing those math skills and put them to good competitive use from 13-30th November 2022. All grade 1-6 students in the UAE are invited to participate in their favourite Online Math Competition, hosted by The Knowledge Hub, by making sure their school registers with us by 7th November 2022.

The competition is aligned to students’ curriculum and will be a great way to prepare for the upcoming end of term exams. Data collected during the competition will be shared with the participating schools so that they can assess their students’ performance when completing tasks during the competition.

Competition winners can expect to receive prizes, such as certificates, trophies, and Mathletics licenses. Winners will be announced in December 2022 and prizes will be distributed by January 2023. Moreover, lucky winners will enter the Hall of Fame for all to see and be inspired. A link to the Hall of Fame can be found in the Student Console. Participants can earn points by completing activities and challenges based on their knowledge of different math topics. Each week, players can earn a maximum of 300 points on any individual activity and 600 points on each test, including a real-time 60-second race testing the speed and accuracy of their mathematics skills.

For Math teachers, the teacher console will show them the points gained by their students on each individual activity. Live Mathletics scores can also be found on the same page. Staying on top of students’ progress will allow teachers to understand the topics students may be finding challenge, prompting revision lessons in the lead up to their term 1 examinations. Teachers should be aware that scores are reset to zero every Sunday, but all points are safely recorded in the student console.

School need to register their Mathletes by 7th November 2022. UAE schools, inclusive of grades 1-6, with a valid Emirates ID (for verification) can participate in this competition. So, hurry and join us for a fun-filled, exciting math journey!

Contact us