Education
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Background: Once you know how to read, it’s impossible to see text the same way as you did before—you will inescapably recognize the symbols as letters the instant that you see them. The issue: This “automatic” parsing of written language makes it easy to forget how much effort was required to initially learn how to…
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Background: People are often glued to their cell phones at all times, thanks primarily to the ease of finding an amusing distraction on the Internet. The issue: There have been various proposals to mitigate the scourge of “phone addiction,” for example, setting your phone screen to black-and-white / grayscale in order to reduce its appeal…
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Background: There’s a huge market for telling people what they want to hear, whether or not it’s true. Additionally, there is a $10,000,000,000+ annual market in self-improvement books in the United States alone. It would be profitable to get even a small slice of this enormous market! The Issue: Writing and promoting a self-help book…
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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Background: The Indiana Jones movies (especially #1 and #3) have taught that it’s a serious liability for an adventurer to acquire a phobia against any animal that may be seen in the course of adventuring (e.g., snakes, rats). Proposal: In order to avoid these problems, we can easily desensitize a future adventure to dangerous animals…
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The issue: Gathering data for scientific studies can be difficult. So why not tap into the world of VIDEO GAMES to conduct experiments on willing participants for no additional monetary cost! Normal scenario: Researcher: “I wonder what factors lead to a person trusting Person A instead of Person B?” or: Researcher: “I suspect that—all else…
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Teachers: help your shy and introverted students engage in discussion with the HELM OF UNRELENTING GAZE, the newest and most valuable teaching fad.
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Background: One problem that educators face is that, with so many students in a lecture hall / classroom, it can be difficult to easily interact with these students on a one-on-one basis. Specifically: Students are far away. Quieter students are difficult to hear. It’s hard to single out a specific student to talk to. Less…
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Background: There have, in the past, been many attempts to make educational games. With the exception of a few unusual successes (with The_Oregon_Trail perhaps being the earliest), these “edu-tainment” titles have generally been colossal failures. The proposal: However, there is no reason that the fusion of gameplay and education must necessarily result in a terrible game. Here,…
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The issue: One common criticism of education, both at the grade school level and at the college level, is that students don’t come away with practical skills. Although it was once sufficient to know basic math, reading, and writing, more is generally expected in the modern era. Proposal: As a supplement to traditional teaching, a…
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TITLE: One weird tip to having every meeting end punctually! It involves sharks, though. Background: People giving presentations are famous for going over their allotted time. However, presentations are frequently unmoderated or have a lax moderator, leading to time overages being the norm rather than the exception. Proposal: An automated system that made the presentation…
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