GoKawiil
Tech News
Snap! is a block-based programming environment designed to be approachable for beginners while still supporting rigorous computer science education. It extends the block-programming style popularized by Scratch but adds features that let users build higher-order functions, recursion, and other advanced concepts typically reserved for text-based languages.
In her new book, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer documents how Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies embedded themselves in K-12 education over the past 15 years, supplying free coding curricula and tools like Swift and Minecraft to promote computer science as a path to jobs. She argues AI companies are now pitching schools with a nearly identical playbook, offering free resources while cultivating future customers and workers.
A marketing executive who is also a parent argues that entry-level hires need more than basic familiarity with AI applications. She says the real differentiator for young workers is knowing how to evaluate, question and apply AI outputs responsibly rather than simply operating the software.
After losing hundreds of thousands of students during the pandemic, community colleges are now seeing sustained enrollment growth, with 5.8 million students enrolled in spring 2026, a 5.2% increase from spring 2021, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data. Researchers say students who left during the pandemic did not simply transfer to four-year universities, which also saw declines among 18- to 24-year-olds.
A 2025 OECD PISA study of over 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries found that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed AI users in science. The performance gap was largest for those using AI to summarize texts or draft assignments, and for those using it either rarely or daily, while moderate, intentional use—especially paired with training to critically evaluate AI outputs—showed smaller drops or even slight gains over non-users.
A study spanning randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda found that 20-minute weekly tutoring calls to primary-school children produced substantial learning gains during COVID-19-related school closures. The approach paired widely available mobile phones with tutoring tailored to each child's current skill level, costing about $11 per child, and worked whether delivered by government teachers or NGO staff.
Researchers tracked children in five countries using baseline and endline phone surveys to measure whether mobile education programmes helped maintain learning during disruptions like COVID-19 lockdowns. The assessments, adapted from the ASER numeracy test, measured math skills alongside child wellbeing and parental engagement, with strict quality checks like time limits and requiring children to explain their answers to prevent parental assistance. Data collection methods varied by country, including a partial baseline in Nepal and administrative data in Kenya.
An investigation by education writer Benjamin Riley exposed practices at Alpha School, a private AI-driven K-12 chain, where students must pass an eight-week bootcamp before enrollment. The regimen reportedly includes building X (formerly Twitter) accounts with paid premium status and organic followers, plus a stress test where students are hooked to heart rate monitors while watching recorded criticism from their parents, failing if their pulse rises more than 10 percent above baseline.
A new Gallup/Walton Family Foundation poll finds only 32% of American adults are satisfied with K-12 education quality, an 11-point drop over two years and the lowest mark in 27 years of polling. Dissatisfaction has climbed to 67%, with Democrats showing the steepest decline—about 19 points since Trump's second term began—while independents and Republicans also reported smaller drops.
A contributor writing for Entrepreneur argues that universities are structurally too slow to keep pace with AI-driven shifts in workforce skills, citing 18-month approval cycles for new degree programs and 9-to-12-month faculty hiring timelines. The piece introduces the concept of a 'university intrapreneur' — faculty, staff, administrators or students who solve problems and build solutions from within an institution before official policy or funding catches up, launching this as the first in a series on the topic.
A poster on Hacker News with a traditional Bayesian statistics background argues that most existing statistics textbooks fail to build genuine intuition, citing the interactive site Seeing Theory as a model of clearer teaching. They are polling the community on whether a book built around intuitive explanations would find an audience, and what resources people currently rely on to learn statistics.
New York City Public Schools banned student-facing AI tools for all K-8 classrooms this week, allowing only a limited set of approved programs for high schoolers, while Los Angeles Unified is enacting a similarly tighter policy for the 2026-27 school year. The move reverses the more permissive stance both districts adopted starting in 2023, after they initially banned ChatGPT outright when it launched in late 2022.