“The kids of today tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world. But unless we give them tools to build with computers, we are raising only consumers instead of creators,” says programmer Linda Liukas. That’s why parents and teachers should introduce coding as a creative act — a playful form of making that requires imagination, bravery and perseverance. Ready to teach your kids how to code? Here are 5 great places to start.

1) Hello Ruby
Hello Ruby is a whimsical website (and book!) created by Liukas to explain programming fundamentals to kids. The detailed lesson plans are appropriate for kids 5+.

2) Code.org
Code.org teaches students the basics of programming through a free series of guided exercises — and is one of several resources on this list to be recommended by the TED Technology Team. To bring coding into your classroom, check out the Hour of Code model.

3) Scratch
Created and maintained by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT’s Media Lab, Scratch is a both a programming language and an evolving community of young coders. To get started, dive into these resources.

4) Girls Who Code
Will the next generation of computer scientists include more Ada Lovelaces? Yes, if teachers and parents inspire more girls to start coding — and to embrace risk. “Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure,” says founder Reshma Saujani. “Coding is an endless process of trial and error.” Learn more about the Girls Who Code curriculum here.

5) CS Unplugged 
Even a Waldorf school can get excited about these computer science teaching tools. “CS Unplugged has activities you can do without a computer to teach programming fundamentals,” says Liukas.

Image credit: Celeste Lai/TED-Ed

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Curiosity is the ultimate discovery tool. It can lead us to dream about the future, or question the world around us, or discover new ideas worth spreading. Ready to sharpen your curiosity this week? Watch the 5 TED-Ed Lessons below — all created in collaboration with TED2016 speakers.

1. How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

One day, Eratosthenes, a librarian of the Library of Alexandria, received a letter from someone who noticed that when he looked down a well at noon on the solstice, the sun was directly overhead. This simple observation, paired with impressive geometry, helped Eratosthenes calculate the diameter of the earth within 1 percent. Adam Savage, co-host of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters, shares how seemingly insignificant insights led to great discoveries, such as the speed of light and the movement of subatomic particles. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

2. A brief history of plural words

1 goose, 2 geese. 1 book, 2 beek? A thousand years ago, the latter would be correct as well. Today, making a word plural isn’t always as simple as adding an “s” to the end. To find out how English plurals got so irregular, John McWhorter tracks how the Viking invasion shaped the way we speak today. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

3. Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na’vi real languages?

What do Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, Avatar’s Na’vi, Star Trek’s Klingon and LOTR’s Elvish have in common? They are all fantasy constructed languages, or conlangs. Conlangs have all the delicious complexities of real languages: a high volume of words, grammar rules, and room for messiness and evolution. John McWhorter explains why these invented languages captivate fans long past the rolling credits. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

4. The language of lying

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we’ve spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach? Noah Zandan uses some famous examples of lying to illustrate how we might use communications science to analyze the lies themselves. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

5. What if we could look inside human brains?

The brain is a miraculous machine, able to form emotions, dreams, and even thoughts about its own existence. But still, much of how it works remains a mystery. Moran Cerf, a professor of neuroscience, explains how instead of just scanning them from the outside, scientists can now look inside living brains. By inserting electrodes into epilepsy patients, scientists can see which cells fire in response to specific stimuli, giving insight into the relationship between thought and action. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

To learn more about TED2016, go here and here.

In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. In the years since, we haven’t paused in our quest to understand why we dream. And while we still don’t have any definitive answers, we have some theories. Here are seven reasons we might dream.

1. In the early 1900’s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams, including our nightmares, are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives, they also have symbolic meanings which relate to the fulfillment of our subconscious wishes.  Freud theorized that everything we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious, primitive thoughts, urges and desires. Freud believed that by analyzing those remembered elements, the unconscious content would be revealed to our conscious mind, and psychological issues stemming from its repression could be addressed and resolved.

2. To increase performance on certain mental tasks, sleep is good, but dreaming while sleeping is better.  In 2010, researchers found that subjects were much better at getting through a complex 3D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze prior to their second attempt. In fact, they were up to ten times better at it than those who only thought of the maze while awake between attempts, and those who napped but did not dream about the maze. Researchers theorize that certain memory processes can happen only when we are asleep, and our dreams are a signal that these processes are taking place.

3. There are about ten thousand trillion neural connections within the architecture of your brain. They are created by everything you think, and everything you do.  A 1983 neurobiological theory of dreaming, called “reverse learning,” holds that while sleeping, and mainly during REM sleep cycles, your neocortex reviews these neural connections and dumps the unnecessary ones. Without this unlearning process, which results in your dreams, your brain could be overrun by useless connections, and parasitic thoughts could disrupt the necessary thinking you need to do while you’re awake.

4. The “Continual Activation Theory” proposes that your dreams result from your brain’s need to constantly consolidate and create long term memories in order to function properly. So when external input falls below a certain level, like when you’re asleep, your brain automatically triggers the generation of data from its memory storages, which appear to you in the form of the thoughts and feelings you experience in your dreams. In other words, your dreams might be a random screensaver your brain turns on so it doesn’t completely shut down.

5. Dreams involving dangerous and threatening situations are very common, and the Primitive Instinct Rehearsal Theory holds that the content of a dream is significant to its purpose.  Whether it’s an anxiety filled night of being chased through the woods by a bear, or fighting off a ninja in a dark alley, these dreams allow you to practice your fight or flight instincts and keep them sharp and dependable, in case you’ll need them in real life. But it doesn’t always have to be unpleasant; for instance, dreams about your attractive neighbor could actually give your reproductive instinct some practice too.

6. Stress neurotransmitters in the brain are much less active during the REM stage of sleep, even during dreams of traumatic experiences, leading some researchers to theorize that one purpose of dreaming is to take the edge off painful experiences to allow for psychological healing. Reviewing traumatic events in your dreams with less mental stress may grant you a clearer perspective and an enhanced ability to process them in psychologically healthy ways. People with certain mood disorders and PTSD often have difficulty sleeping, leading some scientists to believe that lack of dreaming may be a contributing factor to their illnesses.

7. Unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, in your dreams your mind can create limitless scenarios to help you grasp problems and formulate solutions that you may not consider while awake. John Steinbeck called it “the Committee of Sleep” and research has demonstrated the effectiveness of dreaming on problem solving. It’s also how renowned chemist August Kekule discovered the structure of the benzene molecule, and it’s the reason that sometimes the best solution for a problem is to “sleep on it”.

And those are just a few of the more prominent theories. As technology increases our capability for understanding the brain, it’s possible that one day we will discover the definitive reason for them; but until that time arrives, we’ll just have to keep on dreaming.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Why do we dream? – Amy Adkins. Animation by @clamanne.

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