IT Insights Blog — Education

The Flying Lizards are right! The best things in life really are free. Or at least that's what we're hearing from the kids these days. Almost every kid we know who likes video games is flipping his or her lid about something called Fortnite. A "fortnight," which is a thing the British gave the world, is a period of two weeks. Sounds more like a half-month than a fort-anything, if you ask us, but it turns out that the British didn't actually ask anyone. It's just their thing.

Here in the United States, where TestOut Continuing Education is headquartered, public schools — mostly high schools — tend to lump computer skills classes in with everything else that falls under the label "career and technical education," or CTE. In 2018, computer skills are of central importance to learning in most subjects, so it seems a little behind the times to think of knowing stuff about computers as having application only in the CTE bailiwick.

The number of followers that a person has on Twitter is widely seen as being a measure of the number of followers that a person has on Twitter. It's true that people impute value of varying degrees and types to the number of mostly anonymous, largely faceless people who are represented by that 101M (if you're Barack Obama), or 4.84M (if you're Stephen King), or 11K (if you're some rando who goes by "@TestOutCE" — weird, huh?), or whatever it is.

Depending on who you ask, it's either 50 miles or 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) straight up from the surface of Mother Earth to "space." The discrepancy is accounted for by a variation in measurement between the United States and the rest of the world. You might ask the students of Clint Thomsen, a CTE instructor for Tooele County School District in Utah. The kids have firsthand ...

OK, show of hands: Who out there reading this post remembers those old Choose Your Own Adventure novels? There were 184 of them published between 1979 and 1998. The first in the series is The Cave of Time, written by Edward Packard, who pioneered the concept. There was a spinoff series for younger readers, and themed series for both Walt Disney and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.