BiblioTech™ Adaptive Reader vs CrushStations

Help Maya get to CityHacks! CityHacks is finally here, the big coding club for people interested in making games and apps. The club meets on Thursdays and Fridays every week from 8pm to midnight. This is a fantastic opportunity for Maya and her big brother, the only snag is that their mom is concerned about the amount of sleep her kids would lose by joining the club. Help Maya convince her Mom to let her go to CityHacks by taking notes that support her argument. Present these notes to Maya’s mom at the end of the story to see if Maya gets to go to CityHacks. CityHacks: In Search of Sleep is the first in the BiblioTech™ series and is designed to be a complementing interactive reader to the STEM concepts in the Emmy® Award winning public television show Scientastic! Are you sleeping, Dormez vous?, produced by the same team. What is BiblioTech™? BiblioTech™ is a platform for enjoying engaging learning experiences through reading and interactive materials. Learn important factual content, like the science behind why getting enough sleep is so important. And you get to do this while you build your own branching story. Each chapter features a decision point where the reader decides where to go next, which creates 100s of variations on the flow of the story. While reading the story, you’ll be able to take notes in your notebook. Images, illustrations, definitions, and key terms and concepts can be collected in your digital notebook. Interactive items contain games, video interviews, and activities that can give you more notes that you can add to your notebook. By taking notes, you will be able to influence the storyline and help the main character complete her quest. Features include: Unique and Interactive Experiences -Choose how the story unfolds as you read -Play fun games and puzzles -Watch video interviews with real life experts -Interact with colorful charts and graphs Easy-to-use Reading and Note Taking Tools -Turn pages with a swipe -Easy navigation inside the book -Take notes while you read -Tap highlighted words for instant definitions -Automatically save your progress as you read Privacy Policy: http://dynamoid.com/privacy/Bibliotech+Adaptive+Reader

CrushStations is a game designed to train working memory, a subskill of executive functions. Working memory involves holding information in mind and mentally working with it (Diamond, 2013). Players need to remember the color and type of creatures to free them and keep them out of reach of the hungry octopus. How does this support learning? Executive functions refer to a set of top-down, goal-oriented cognitive processes that enable people to control, monitor and plan behaviors and emotions. Miyake and Friedman’s model supports a unity-and-diversity view of EF in that it incorporates the three distinct but related components of EF: inhibitory control, task-switching and updating (Miyake et al., 2000). What is the research evidence? Our research suggests that CrushStations is an effective way to train working memory. The study supporting this claim will be published soon. Research has found that EF is related to performance in literacy and math along with long-term gains in school performance and academic readiness (Blair & Razza, 2007; Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009; St Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006; Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010) and that disparities in EF among preschool children from low-income versus high-income homes may contribute to the achievement gap (Blair & Razza, 2007; Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007). This game is part of the Smart Suite, created by New York University’s CREATE lab in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and The Graduate Center, CUNY. The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A150417 to the University of California, Santa Barbara. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.