Check out this CNN video. Code for America's Jennifer Pahlka explains.
By John D. Sutter, CNN
(CNN) - Think video games are evil? Spend some time with Jane McGonigal.
McGonigal - a designer who's queen of a genre called "Alternate Reality Games," or ARGs - believes games make us better people. They can be used to combat climate change, reduce poverty and, as she knows personally, help victims of conditions like depression, head injuries and cancer recover more quickly.
"Games are an extraordinary way to tap into the best version of yourself, the most determined, the most creative, the most resilient in the face of failure, the most likely to collaborate with other people - sort of heroic qualities," she said in a recent interview with CNN's "The Next List," which will feature McGonigal on Sunday at 2 p.m. ET. "And it seems that if we play more games - games that we love - these qualities can actually spill over into our real lives." FULL POST
Editor's Note: Jose Gomez-Marquez is the Program Director for Innovations in International Health at MIT and heads up the Little Devices group, where he uses toy parts to create inexpensive medical devices for developing countries. Watch The Next List’s full profile on Jose Gomez-Marquez, Sunday April 1 at 2 p.m. ET on CNN.
By Jose Gomez-Marquez, Special to CNN
Have you gotten caught up in the endless healthcare debate that can lead to comparing our healthcare system with France, the UK, or even Cuba? Our work in medical device research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed to healthcare lessons in unexpected places: Nicaragua, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and even suburban hacker spaces in America. What they have in common is their development of do-it-yourself (DIY) medical technology.
We are and have always been a nation of makers. Along the way, someone told us that healthcare technology was off the table. But we have the technology, the hardware, and the prototyping resources to change that and bring down healthcare costs. Now, we have to recruit everyday inventors that are not part of the conventional “medical industrial complex” - the types of inventors we find all over the developing world, saving lives every day. FULL POST
Hugh Herr, who is the director of the Biomechatronics group at MIT’s Media Lab and the founder of iWalk. He invents bionic limbs that move like flesh and bone. Herr lost both of his limbs in a tragic mountain climbing accident. Watch Hugh Herr’s entire story on Sunday March 25 at 2 pm E.T. on CNN.
Hugh Herr believes there's no such thing as disability - only bad technology.
The double-amputee says the bionic limbs he’s inventing will transform the way amputees experience their lives, will revolutionize sports and predicts the advancement of limb technology will change the psychology of disability.
He uses words like “sexy”, “cool” and “powerful” to describe his disability.
“I’m often asked if I was granted a wish from a magic fairy, would I wish my biological legs back? And I always say absolutely not,” says Herr. “My bionic limbs are part of my creation. They’re - they’ve become part of my identity.” FULL POST
Matt Goldman, Chris Wink, and Phil Stanton are best known for originating the international entertainment phenomenon, Blue Man Group. They founded Blue School with their wives as a parent-run playgroup in 2006 in answer to their struggles of finding an institution that celebrated curiosity, creativity, and a sense of adventure for their own children.
Since then, the founders have grown the concept exponentially, engaging a number of respected professionals on their advisory board including Sir Ken Robinson, an educational reform advocate, David Rockwell, a renowned architect who built the Imagination Playground, and Dan Siegel, a neuroscientist, among others.
Blue School’s foundation is based in part on utilizing a “co-constructive approach” to learning in which the students have a hand in directing and developing their own curriculum through inquiry and exploration.
In 2010, Blue School acquired the former Seamen’s Church Institute building in the South Street Seaport of Manhattan. With the help of architect David Rockwell, it was remodeled into a state-of-the-art school featuring flexible space plans and community areas flooded with light, presently accommodating children from two years old up through the third grade.
As a lab school, Blue School is blazing a trail in education and plans to encourage further innovation through an Educators Institute where they can develop the “Blue” method further, share it, and ultimately build upon it well beyond the scope of the original concept.
Tune into CNN Sunday at 2 p.m. ET to see the full 30-minute profile on Blue School. Please Follow us, Like us, and check out our photos!
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
Austin, Texas (CNN) – Any author or filmmaker seeking ideas for a sci-fi yarn about the implications of artificial intelligence - good or bad - would be smart to talk to Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil, the acclaimed inventor and futurist, believes that humans and technology are blurring - note the smartphone appendages in almost everyone's hand - and will eventually merge.
"We are a human-machine civilization. Everybody has been enhanced with computer technology," he told a capacity crowd of more than 3,000 tech-savvy listeners Monday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. "They're really part of who we are.
Editor's note: "The Next List" features innovative people each Sunday. This week, the CNN show profiled Daniel Ogola, a health care advocate in Kenya. Check out these two videos to see how Ogola is using heath to promote wealth.
(CNN) - Born into poverty, Kenyan entrepreneur Daniel Ogola has devoted his life to bettering his community – both in the notorious Kibera slum in Nairobi, where he lived as a young man, and in his hometown of Ukwala in Western Kenya.
But Dan is more than just a hero. A true agent of change, he’s employing his unique personal experience to engineer game-changing solutions on a societal scale.
Despite decades of poverty-fighting programs in Kenya - many fostered by outside interest funneling millions of dollars to hard-hit areas - the problem remains entrenched. Years living and working in poor areas of Kenya have taught Dan that the key to productivity is health. And today he’s using that “tool” to create jobs – and new opportunity – in one of Kenya’s poorest regions.
By Dan Ogola, Special to CNN
Editor's Note: Dan Ogola is the founder and director of the Matibabu Foundation, a organization in Eastern Africa creating jobs and opportunity through healthcare. Founded in 2006, Matibabu has offered health services to over 60,000 Kenyans. It recently opened the community’s first hospital, a state-of-the art facility drawing new businesses to one of the country’s poorest regions. Ogola will be featured on CNN’s The Next List this Sunday at 2 p.m. ET.
(CNN) - I was born 35 years ago in Ugenya, Kenya, as the fifth of eight children. My brother passed on when he was two months old as a result of malaria. He was not taken to hospital but instead anointed with oil by a priest to “cure” him. Our third born was disabled due to polio, and hidden in the house due to the stigma, and could not attend school. My father died when I was 19 years old leaving my mother to take care of us.
My mother, Patricia Ogola, was an uneducated housewife married at the age of 15, and because of the many children she had, she struggled to make ends meet by brewing the local traditional brew. This led to a lot of run-ins with the local policemen who demanded bribes for her to continue making the illicit brew, driving the family into further poverty.
Due to the difficulties in Ugenya for our family, my brothers and I left for Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, to try and do odd jobs in order to support ourselves and the family back at home.
My mother’s case is a typical case of women in Ugenya. Many were married young and had several children as they were uneducated and did not have access to family planning. Many were also widowed because of HIV/AIDS thus increasing their poverty levels as they were unemployed. Many others also died while giving birth due to inaccessibility of health facilities. Many children also suffered the fate of my brothers.
By John D. Sutter, CNN
(CNN) - For being such a secretive and sometimes-frightening agency, DARPA also knows how to have a lot of fun with technology. In 2009, you may recall, DARPA, a branch of the U.S. Defense Department, set loose 10 red weatherballoons all over the contiguous United States and then paid $40,000 to the team that used social media to be the first to locate all of the balloons. What made the challenge so awesome was that no one person could possibly solve that puzzle alone. They had to use the Internet to do so.
A team from MIT (shocking, right?) won that contest in less than 9 hours.
Now the agency has launched a new project involving a global hunt for QR Codes. The "CLIQR Quest Challenge" started on February 23 and continues until Thursday at noon. DARPA says the contest is designed to "advance the understanding of social media and the Internet, and explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems." The blog TechCrunch saw right through that government-speak and declared, more or less, that DARPA was preparing to crowdsource the aftermath of the apocolypse: FULL POST
Each week, CNN's "The Next List" profiles innovators, visionaries and agents of change. They’re not household names just yet, but they’re movers and shakers in their own worlds. We’re introducing them to you because these individuals are steadily mapping the course to the future with their new ideas.
WHO: Host Dr. Sanjay Gupta
WHEN: Sundays at 2 p.m. ET
WHERE: Only on CNN
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