This post is in partnership with University of Phoenix
What if you could build a textbook perfectly tailored to your studies and learning style? Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk created Connexions, an online library resource, to do just that. Find out how Connexions deconstructs textbooks and lets you put them back together, helping learners become teachers and teachers become learners.
This video is part four in our Future Learning video series about technology in classrooms. Check out our first video on Khan Academy here. Learn about Digita Tabula, which makes lessons more like video games here, and Innovations for Learning’s electronic teaching aids here.
The Spanish coastline during the summer can have unbearable heat, especially due to rising temperatures caused by climate change. As a result, towns such as Alhaurín de la Torre are bombarded with dangerous levels of heat for residents and tourists. However, there is relief in the town’s shopping district thanks to a growing group of knitting grannies.
In 2019, Eva Pacheco partnered with the Senior Citizens’ Social Center to knit a multi-quilt awning to shade the popular Malaga Street from the sun. The heat had been a growing issue for Spain’s tourist industry, especially along the coast. It was important to protect citizens and visitors alike from sunburn, heat stroke, or worse.
A different kind of community project
Every Wednesday, 40 elderly women from the community would gather, socialize, knit, and crochet for three hours. They would then stitch all of their creations together to create a colossal quilt. In the end, they created a 500-square-foot awning so residents and tourists could shop on Malaga Street while being protected from the sun. To say it was a success would be an understatement.
The shade provided by the giant blanket lowered the temperature by as much as ten degrees. It also shielded folks underneath from harmful UV rays. Since the knitted awning was primarily made from water-resistant synthetic yarn, it wouldn’t absorb water during rainy days.
Lastly, it was reusable. The awning could be taken down after the summer months. This way, it could be washed, repaired, and reinstalled every year.
It not only improved the lives of the shoppers outside, but also those of the knitters and crocheters. The majority of the team that created the massive quilt were older widows who didn’t have many social outlets for making friends. Along with that, according to AARP, knitting can also help stave off Alzheimer’s, among other health benefits.
Since its initial creation, the colorful, shade-producing blanket has dramatically increased in size. It is currently over 13,000 square feet and features many more colorful designs. In 2024, the group started creating knitted blankets and quilts featuring the faces of celebrities like Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, and many others. While intended to protect tourists while shopping, the awning has become a tourist attraction itself.
Other places take notice
Their success has since inspired many other communities to create their own quilted canopies to provide shade. The residents of the nearby city of Coín have also created quilt barriers to protect against the sun’s heat. La Línea de la Concepción has a similar series of canopies, but they are made of mandalas rather than blankets. It has also inspired New Iberia, a sister city of Alhaurín de la Torre, to make its own “crochet ceilings.”
Over time, there will hopefully be other methods to cool down our streets. There is something to be said for the fact that it took creativity, community, and a little bit of fun to come up with a quality solution.
For many people, working out isn’t the hard part. It’s everything that comes with it: the time commitment, the pressure of consistency, and the feeling that only full workouts count.
That all-or-nothing mindset keeps a lot of people from even getting started. This might explain why a small idea has been gaining traction. Instead of setting aside an hour or two to exercise, people are taking “micro walks” instead.
Two women enjoy a quick “micro walk.” Photo credit: Canva
“Micro walks” are simple and still provide the benefits
A loop around the block in the morning. A quick break between meetings or events on the daily schedule. Perhaps another lap after dinner. These short walks sprinkled throughout the day might seem too simple to matter.
For a growing number of people, the simplicity is what makes it really work. Doing less at a time, but more often, is what’s resonating. The barrier to entry suddenly drops. People don’t need much motivation. Just a few minutes is enough to get started.
The appeal of a “micro walk” for people dreading a workout isn’t necessarily about peak optimization. The benefits come from gaining momentum. For individuals who have spent years feeling like they’re either all-in or completely off track, this offers a third option.
Short periods of exercise fit into the structure of real life instead of competing with it. Finding the time to set aside large blocks of time can be difficult for many people. Breaking movement into smaller increments makes it far more manageable.
In the end, consistency matters more than perfection. Getting daily steps in becomes something achievable rather than overwhelming.
A 2024 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a scientific journal recognized for its rigorous reviews, investigated the benefits of different walking patterns. The findings revealed that short walking bursts use more energy than longer continuous walks. Breaking up exercise is more impactful than it seems.
Harvard Health Publishing reported that even brief walks can boost energy and counteract the effects of prolonged sitting. Getting moving has significant heart health advantages, and walking is extremely accessible.
Turning short walks into a mental reset can boost a person’s emotional well-being. Physical exercise stimulates the body, yet it also increases inner harmony. A 2025 study published in Springer Nature found that even a 10-minute walk can meaningfully improve mood regulation. Finding the time for a brief walk can lessen symptoms of anxiety.
A 2024 study published in Nature demonstrated that short activity breaks increase cognitive performance and elevate mood. There are immediate emotional advantages to activities like “micro walks,” not just long-term fitness gains.
Science demonstrates that walking has both physical and emotional benefits. The most common barriers are time and motivation. Shifting from big goals to showing up in small, repeatable moments is what actually matters. “Micro walks” turn movement from something people have to make time for into something that becomes part of how they live. It’s another small step toward finding happiness.
When was the last time you paid attention to your commute? And I don’t mean a couple of feet in front of you, at the car merging into your lane without a blinker. I mean really paid attention to the route you take.
Did you see the landmarks in the distance that make up the city skyline? Did you drive right past the grocery store you promised to stop by at the corner of this Peachtree Street or that Peachtree Street, a struggle Atlanta locals know well?
“Oops! Force of habit,” you might say to yourself as you miss your turn and begin to think about when and where you can turn around.
Relying on familiarity can either facilitate or impede daily navigation. As a researcher studying memory and navigation, I aim to understand how the brain supports spatial navigation and what happens if the cognitive mechanisms for choosing the best route home begin to decline, such as during stress or with aging.
Humans are creatures of habit – at least that’s what people tell themselves when wary of trying something new. But what if a new route is faster or safer than the one you usually take? Would you try it?
Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation.
Spatial navigation refers to the cognitive ability that helps you travel from one location to another. It may sound simple, but it requires using cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision-making and assessing potential rewards – never mind the ability to simply perceive the environment itself.
For example, you might retrieve an episodic memory about a specific event: remembering a detour you took a week ago to drop a package off at the post office, including the traffic and weather that day.
You might also retrieve a semantic memory that’s more factual and knowledge-based: remembering how many blocks away the post office is from the park and the turns you need to make to get there.
Together, these kinds of memory inform your spatial memory, which allows you to retrieve location information. This could be where buildings are in relation to each other or where objects are situated in your house. Spatial memories help form your cognitive map, which is essential for getting around in the world.
Often, these different ways of remembering interact, and you can use one type of memory to inform the other. For example, you’ve become accustomed to your commute to work and know it’s relatively short (semantic memory), but over the past three days you’ve been arriving late due to heavy traffic (episodic memory), so you choose to take a different route next time.
Research from my team has found that disagreements in your brain over possible routes can happen. Different types of memory can come up with different solutions for what route you can take, and this conflict is a big factor in how hard your brain needs to work when navigating an environment.
Responding to new and familiar memories
Habits stem from what researchers call stimulus-response memories. These include the knee-jerk reaction you might have to familiar landmarks – when you perceive these places, your brain signals you to make a turn along your commute without needing to consciously think about it.
Habits are rigid, but they can also be beneficial: By taking care of the navigation for you, habit frees up your brain to have a conversation with someone or plan what to make for dinner when you get home.
When navigating less familiar routes or environments, where habit doesn’t kick in automatically, you rely on brain regions such as the hippocampus to call on detailed memories from recent experiences to help guide the way.
But let’s say you’re shopping at a new grocery store where most things are where you expect them to be, even though you’ve never been in this particular store before. What happens when your brain experiences both something new and something familiar about an environment?
Researchers have shown that when something about an environment is familiar and aligns with your prior experiences, the prefrontal regions of your brain – those responsible for executive functions such as decision-making – become more active. They can bypass or even inhibit your hippocampus’s ability to form new memories about specific events.
In other words, your brain can weave information about a new experience into your database of existing knowledge, rather than storing it as completely new information with little relation to the past. This process may help fast-track your understanding about new experiences.
Updating cognitive maps
Researchers know that cognitive maps of the environment depend on the hippocampus and its database of memories about specific events. However, I and other researchers argue these maps can also function as a schema – a collection of memories made up of associations between environmental details. You can add new information to these collections and use it to infer new relationships.
Say a new pedestrian bridge is built between the park and the post office. Your brain can more easily weave this new route information into your existing memories compared with learning a new environment from scratch. Similarly, if you just moved to a new town and know very little about the spatial layout, you might rely on your past experiences of towns to infer where something is.
Using neuroimaging techniques as well as virtual reality programs designed to test a participant’s ability to navigate different routes, my team found that there is likely an interdependent relationship between the brain areas that store memories of specific events and areas that store related information across memories when planning to navigate less familiar places.
New routes are more difficult to follow when they differ from your prior experiences. Thus, a stronger schema helps integrate your knowledge of the spatial relationships between locations and landmarks (such as the distance between the post office and the park) with more general knowledge (such as prior route difficulty). This all informs how you choose to navigate.
Navigating daily life
These memory principles help explain why inconsistencies with your previous experiences can make it so difficult to navigate many aspects of daily life.
Imagine you woke up tomorrow and the GPS on your smartphone was no longer available. How will you plan your route to get to your destination?
You might be used to navigating north from your home to the grocery store – but have you ever tried to navigate to that grocery story from a different location? It’s much harder!
Relating new information to your prior experiences may help strengthen your schema and make navigation easier. And understanding what processes the brain needs to go through to solve these navigation problems can help you understand why getting around can be challenging.
