learning

Super Why is an interactive, educational reading game for preschoolers based on the hit PBS Kids show of the same name, featuring (much to the delight of Super Why fans, no doubt) many of the original sounds, games, and characters from the show.

Super Why gives you four different character-narrated, touch-based games, each with a different task for kids: Super Why's Story Saver (picking one of three words to correctly complete a sentence), Princess Presto's Wands-Up Writing (identifying letters by sound to spell a word, then tracing those letters with your finger), Alpha Pig's Lickety Letter Hunt (… Read more

Sometimes I feel like our society is doomed to dumbness. I mean, just look at the people who appear on reality shows. Heck, look at the people who watch reality shows. (Kidding, kidding. I've been a "Survivor" junkie since day one.)

Fortunately, we can... helping... our brains... be more betterer. And all it takes is the gadget that's already riding shotgun in your pocket. Check out Six ways your iPhone can make you smarter, a roundup of apps (well, mostly) that'll teach you a thousand or two new things.

Hey, and while you're in … Read more

FirstWords Deluxe is a reading game for toddlers that helps teach letter recognition. This deluxe version combines all the words from the original FirstWords apps (for Vehicles, Animals, At Home, Colors, and Shapes, giving you 147 words in all) into a single app.

The friendly, cartoony interface is simple: once you tap one of the categories on the front page, you're shown a page with an object (such as a taxi or a color or a cat) along with scattered letter tiles that make up the object's name--which a toddler can then drag and drop into the correct … Read more

With more than half of new Mac purchases going to those new to Apple, one app developer has taken the challenge of teaching the novices. Available now in the Mac App Store, Learning the Switch to Mac from "It's About Time Products" is a comprehensive overview of basic (and a few more-advanced) functions on the Mac.

Learning the Switch to Mac offers guided courses in performing many of the simple tasks that escape users coming over to Mac from the PC environment. You can learn how to utilize your Address Book, including printing labels; take advantage of … Read more

I am not the kind of person who needs to read the help pages on Web sites--at least most of the time. But the same cannot be said for a lot of folks I know. In fact just this past weekend I was showing someone in their late-60s (who is quite smart, I might add) where the full screen button was on YouTube.

In that same vein is a new site called Grovo, which breaks down how to use popular Internet sites into short, two-minute video tutorials. Included are places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs, Craigslist, and even Yelp.… Read more

A humanoid robot baby has taught itself to shoot a bow and arrow, and all we can say is: Hide the kids and the pets. Assault rifles can't be too far off.

Petar Kormushev and his colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology's Advanced Robotics department taught the little guy how to hold a bow and release the arrow. Then, using two algorithms and visual feedback from a camera, the bot learned to aim and shoot arrows, hitting the center of a target 11.5 feet away in only eight tries.

The robot behind the bow is iCub, … Read more

It is fascinating the ways in which the world of computing can be made easier, thus creating opportunity for new complexities--usually in the form of new computing technologies. It's happened with programming languages, software architectures, computer networks, data center design, and systems virtualization. However, nothing has raised the bar on that concept like IT automation.

You may have been expecting to hear the term "cloud computing," but cloud is just an outcome of good automation. It's an operations model--a business model to some--that was only made possible by a standardization of the core elements of … Read more

There are people who believe in astrology and people who don't, and even those who do have to admit that sometimes people just make stuff up. Mystic Board seems to specialize in software that does just that, taking popular aspects of New Age spirituality and creating software that's only marginally related. MB Fashion Astrology is but one more example of this.

Like all Mystic Board programs, MB Fashion Astrology's interface is cluttered with ads. The program asks for the user's full first, middle, and last names--which have absolutely no bearing on the results--and the user's … Read more

Google's quest to build the ultimate machine-learning system has produced some lessons of its own.

The project, code-named "Seti" in a nod to the search for life in outer space, is being used on huge data sets in an attempt to solve what Google calls "hard prediction problems." Google revealed the name of the project in a blog post Tuesday that also acknowledged the limits of engineering.

Machine learning is a favorite topic of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and is useful for improving translation algorithms and semantic understanding, according to Google. But, … Read more