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Entrepreneurship and Education

Recently, entrepreneurship has been added onto the curriculum of many schools. Educators are demanded by many parties, especially from parents who are involved in businesses, to teach their students about entrepreneurship, even at the early stage of education. The old teaching method is now being avoided since it only made students to memorize facts and students never had the chance to explore their creativity which they should develop to grow their entrepreneur mindset.

Let’s take a look at how Kauffman foundation defines the term entrepreneur and tells how important it is for educators to take part in building young entrepreneur. This foundation has a good program for young entrepreneurship.  “What do kids know about being entrepreneurs? Turns out their curiosity about the world around them, natural creativity, willingness to take risks, and unbridled enthusiasm add up to the characteristics of our greatest entrepreneurs.”

It is not easy of course to mingle entreprenurship into the curriculum since not many teachers really understand about entrepreneurship itself, therefore it is best to get advives and support from real entrepreneurs about how the education should mold their students so that it may arisen entrepreneurship within themselves. There are some programs from Kauffman  Foundation which are really interesting for students to join for.

One of the program is Hot Shot Business that is an award-winning Internet simulation game in which boys and girls can run a business in Opportunity City at Disney.com. This game is developed by the creative team at Disney Online with the entrepreneurship expertise of the Kauffman Foundation. it is really a fun game to play which teach kids about entrepreneurial concepts and skills just like in the real world - kids learn how to open businesses and also make adjustments based on the market trends, customer preferences and news events. There are many other programs from Kauffman Foundation which will make many young entrepreneurs.

Posted on December 9th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Educational Organization | No Comments »

Food Force: Fighting Hunger Around the World

Food Force

About Food Force

Provided by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), Food Force is a free educational video game telling the story of a hunger crisis on the fictitious island of Sheylan.

Comprised of 6 mini-games or “missions”, this game takes young players from an initial crisis assessment through to delivery and distribution of food aid, with each sequential mission addressing a particular aspect of this challenging process.

What does Food Force teach?

The various Food Force missions demonstrate and help explain the following hunger learning topics:

  • What is hunger and who are the hungry?
  • Why are people hungry and malnourished?
  • What can we do to help end hunger?

The missions provide an overview of how food aid is used in both emergencies and long-term development projects. Therefore is is suggested to play the game straight through from beginning to end, which takes about half an hour.

In case of limited time or lesson focus, individual missions can be accessed directly from the start-up screen by typing the mission number (1,2,3,4,5 or 6):

  1. Air Surveillance: The causes of hunger and malnutrition
  2. Energy Pacs: Nutrition and the cost of feeding the hungry
  3. Airdrop: WFP’s emergency response
  4. Locate and Dispatch: Global food procurement
  5. The Food Run: Land-based logistics
  6. Future Farming: Long-term food aid projects

The game has wide cross-curricular area (geography, social studies, health, etc.) and can strengthen strategic thinking and decision-making skills. It is an ideal lesson follow-up or homework activity.

Age level

Food Force is designed for children aged 8-13 years. Each mission’s gameplay is unique in order to maximize the game’s appeal to a variety of ages and learning levels.

Download

Food Force is free to download and can be copied and burned into CD and then shared to everyone. To download this file, you will need a broadband connection because it is a big download - 227 Mb for Windows and 215 for Macintosh. On a broadband connection this should take approximately 30 minutes.

Food Force

Posted on November 28th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Software | No Comments »

Simple with Quality

Kigose has a new motto now. It is “simple with quaility”. We know that Kigose is not a big competitor from huge corporate websites such as Yahooligans, Askkids or FactMonster yet we try to give something difference from those big sites to users. We would keep our site simple without flash or too many images. The purpose is to give quick result for users.

If many kids search engines and kids websites claim to have plentiful of educational resources on their site, we would only just provide a few resources yet with high quality and relevancy. We try to ignore sites with so many advertisements or sites with obsolete games and information. We also exclude sites which are only directory links where visitors need to find again the links for the information they are looking for.

Hopefully with this new motto, Kigose would be a good option for educational search engine and website in the future. Currently we are still working on providing safe image search.

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by admin
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Educational Directory

Educational directory is a project to integrate Kids and Teens and also Reference category from DMOZ directory into our site. In this educational directory, students and teachers can find more resources without leaving our site. DMOZ is an open directory which is a largest human-edited directory on the web. Each link is reviewed by approved editors around the world so the directory is very resourceful.

We have set up two separate categories which are Kids & Teens and Teachers Reference.  The links in each category is automatically updated when DMOZ editors add or eleminate certain links in the future. We let the layout to be very simple - it’s mainly white! - as we like to have an easy navigation which is more important for users. Moreover, if you hover your mouse onto the links, a pop-up from Snap will open to show the thumbnail of the website.

To visit this educational directory, there is a link from the Links menu on the left of the search box at the homepage. Then, you will need to choose between Kids & Teens directory or Teachers Reference directory. Press the button and it will reload to the directory page you have chosen. Please note that in order to add more links in the directory, you need to apply to be DMOZ editors.

Posted on November 15th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Kigose | No Comments »

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