Global initiative on education launched at U.N.

9/27/2012 12:00:00 AM

Today Lenovo played a role in launching the United Nations Secretary-General’s Education First initiative. Lenovo is a founding member of the new Global Business Coalition for Education, which announced a joint commitment as part of Education First to send high-level business delegations to meet with the leadership of key countries in support of the organization’s mission to improve learning outcomes around the world.

Education First aims to raise the political profile of education, strengthen the global movement to achieve quality education and generate additional and sufficient funding through sustained advocacy efforts. Education First will officially be launched on the margins of UN General Assembly by the Secretary-General and world leaders.

Lenovo has also released the results of a yearlong study with the University of Pennsylvania that produced three reports on the subjects of virtual learning, student engagement and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education:

“Revealing Complex Interactions of Scientific Phenomenon at Multiple Levels: How Digitally Augmented Visualizations Can Enable Learning in a Science Museum” by Susan Yoon, associate professor of education and co-director of C4LS, Penn’s Center for Collaboration, Computation, Complexity, and Creativity in the Learning Sciences

“What Makes Competitions Fun to Participate? The Role of Audience for Middle School Game Designers” by Yasmin Kafai, professor of education and of computer and information science, and co-director of C4LS, Penn’s Center for Collaboration, Computation, Complexity, and Creativity in the Learning Sciences

"Hop, Skip, and Jump: A Pedagogical Progression to Promote Computational Thinking from Schoolyard Games to Block-Based Programming to Text-Based Programming” by Jean Griffin, director of computer science partnerships for Moelis Access Science, a program of Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships

Research results will be made available to the public in the coming weeks.