full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Sara DeWitt: 3 fears about screen time for kids -- and why they're not true

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Our producer in Boston, WGBH, created a seiers of Curious George games focused on math. And researchers came in and had 80 porloreeshcs play these games. They then gave all 80 of those preschoolers a standardized math test. We could see early on that these games were actually helping kids udnstrenad some key slkils. But our partners at UCLA wnated us to dig deeper. They focus on data analysis and student assessment. And they wanted to take that back-end game-play data and see if they could use it to predict a child's math scores. So they made a neural net — they essentially trained the computer to use this data, and here are the rtleuss. This is a subset of the children's standardized math scores. And this is the computer's prediction of each child's score, based on playing some Curious George gaems. The prediction is astonishingly accurate, especially considering the fact that these games weren't built for aemsnssest. The team that did this study believes that games like these can teach us more about a child's cognitive learning than a standardized test can. What if games could ruedce testing time in the classroom? What if they could reduce tsiteng anxiety? How could they give tecraehs snapshots of insight to help them better focus their ivueiildzdanid learning?

Open Cloze

Our producer in Boston, WGBH, created a ______ of Curious George games focused on math. And researchers came in and had 80 ____________ play these games. They then gave all 80 of those preschoolers a standardized math test. We could see early on that these games were actually helping kids __________ some key ______. But our partners at UCLA ______ us to dig deeper. They focus on data analysis and student assessment. And they wanted to take that back-end game-play data and see if they could use it to predict a child's math scores. So they made a neural net — they essentially trained the computer to use this data, and here are the _______. This is a subset of the children's standardized math scores. And this is the computer's prediction of each child's score, based on playing some Curious George _____. The prediction is astonishingly accurate, especially considering the fact that these games weren't built for __________. The team that did this study believes that games like these can teach us more about a child's cognitive learning than a standardized test can. What if games could ______ testing time in the classroom? What if they could reduce _______ anxiety? How could they give ________ snapshots of insight to help them better focus their ______________ learning?

Solution

  1. assessment
  2. testing
  3. results
  4. individualized
  5. skills
  6. wanted
  7. series
  8. games
  9. teachers
  10. preschoolers
  11. understand
  12. reduce

Original Text

Our producer in Boston, WGBH, created a series of Curious George games focused on math. And researchers came in and had 80 preschoolers play these games. They then gave all 80 of those preschoolers a standardized math test. We could see early on that these games were actually helping kids understand some key skills. But our partners at UCLA wanted us to dig deeper. They focus on data analysis and student assessment. And they wanted to take that back-end game-play data and see if they could use it to predict a child's math scores. So they made a neural net — they essentially trained the computer to use this data, and here are the results. This is a subset of the children's standardized math scores. And this is the computer's prediction of each child's score, based on playing some Curious George games. The prediction is astonishingly accurate, especially considering the fact that these games weren't built for assessment. The team that did this study believes that games like these can teach us more about a child's cognitive learning than a standardized test can. What if games could reduce testing time in the classroom? What if they could reduce testing anxiety? How could they give teachers snapshots of insight to help them better focus their individualized learning?

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Important Words

  1. accurate
  2. analysis
  3. anxiety
  4. assessment
  5. astonishingly
  6. based
  7. believes
  8. boston
  9. built
  10. classroom
  11. cognitive
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  18. early
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  20. fact
  21. focus
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  23. games
  24. gave
  25. george
  26. give
  27. helping
  28. individualized
  29. insight
  30. key
  31. kids
  32. learning
  33. math
  34. net
  35. neural
  36. partners
  37. play
  38. playing
  39. predict
  40. prediction
  41. preschoolers
  42. producer
  43. reduce
  44. researchers
  45. results
  46. score
  47. scores
  48. series
  49. skills
  50. snapshots
  51. standardized
  52. student
  53. study
  54. subset
  55. teach
  56. teachers
  57. team
  58. test
  59. testing
  60. time
  61. trained
  62. ucla
  63. understand
  64. wanted
  65. wgbh