Editor’s note: We’re spending this week celebrating dads raising bilingual kids with guest posts written by them in honor of Father’s Day. We love having the dad’s perspective and hope this series encourages other papis to share their stories with us.

I first fell in love with Argentine asado several years ago on a magical New Year’s Eve in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It was my first trip to South America and I was meeting my wife’s large, extended family for the first time. We had caravanned together from Buenos Aires and decided to have a traditional Argentine barbecue at the family’s beach house before heading out on the town to celebrate the new year. What transpired was an unforgettable moment of falling in love with a new culture—its food, its wine, its cooking traditions, and its whole-hearted embrace of familia.

An Argentine asado is a lengthy barbecue, more akin to a fiesta, where family and friends gather for hours on end to eat, drink, talk, laugh, and generally live life at a languid pace unrecognizable by our fast-tempoed, modern society. I was so enchanted by the asado experience that I became an asador and promised to share my passion with the rest of the world.  So, I started Gaucho Garcia, an English-language resource dedicated to South American grilling.

When our daughter, Luna, was born last August, my wife and I knew two things: one, we were dedicated to raising her bilingual and teaching her about her family’s Spanish-speaking roots (I am of Spanish descent and she is Argentine). And two, we committed to educating her about everything related to Argentine cuisine. What better way to raise a bilingual child than to speak Spanish while teaching her the culinary traditions of her family?

In addition, since we were both fluent, we felt that raising Luna bilingual was one of the best gifts we could give her in this life. With so many primos in Buenos Aires and Madrid that we hoped to visit in the years to come, instilling Spanish at an early age seemed imperative so that she could communicate with her family during our travels. In fact, she will embark on her first international adventure to Buenos Aires this September for her cousin’s wedding.

For now, Luna is still just babbling and has only one tooth—not nearly enough to make it through the large portions of bife de lomo that I normally serve at my asados. In no time, however, she will be assisting her Papi with the preparation of la parrilla and helping her Mami in the kitchen with the family’s recipe for empanadas argentinas. And when she comes running to me one day, grinning from ear to ear, and says, “Papi, mira lo que hice en la cocina con Mamita!”, I will know that the commitment we made the day she was born has paid off… and we just might have that fateful New Year’s asado to thank for it all.

Gabriel García is an attorney and an asador living in the Silicon Valley hamlet of Morgan Hill, California. In 2007, he fell in love with South American barbecue after partaking in his first asado with his wife’s family in Argentina. Since then, he began blogging about asados and Argentine cuisine on his website Gaucho Garcia. He is father to a 9-month old baby girl, Luna, who he hopes will one day carry on the recipe for his world-famous chimichurri.

Watch any gamer in action and you’ll see a firsthand demonstration of how the learning curve actually works.  Because video games can be so engaging and addictive, the challenge has become how to harness their power to facilitate and support learning.  The result is gamification in education.  This concept has enormous potential to revamp traditional teaching techniques while pushing students to reach greater levels of personal achievement.  It can also be a vehicle whose long term effect will be to create and develop a desire to learn within the student.  Gamification in education is currently enjoying rapid success at all grade levels and in a variety of academic disciplines.

Fact: over 5 million students spend 45 hours a week playing video games. Worldwide, we spend 3 billion hours a week in front of a computer or gaming device.

As our youth increase access to these devices, with the proper strategy, this can be an opportunity for us to transition our children from unproductive gaming to educational gaming.

Research has shown that in any learning situation, students are typically more engaged when they face a challenge that they feel they can meet.  Naturally, to be effective, the level of challenge should match the student’s skill level. If the task is too difficult, the student may give up quickly, and if it is too easy, the student may lose interest.  We know that students also benefit from multilevel games which become progressively more complex and challenging. Therefore, an effective game allows students the option to begin at varying levels of challenge and gradually increase the level of difficulty.  This is the heart of gamification in education.

As the use of gamification gains momentum, some nursery schools are making computer labs an integral part of their curriculum.  Using gamification to reinforce basic concepts of early childhood education has proven to be very effective and inspiring for the young students.  At the more mature end of the gamification spectrum, at a private school in Sweden, students are tasked with creating online games about themselves.  In this way they not only learn about gaming and success factors in game design, but they also gain insight into incentives and motivations which translates into corporate level business applications.

In response to the need for improved language skills, a company out of San Diego, CA called Tiny Factory has developed a multi-language learning app for iPad, called Lingual.  In its initial launch, it has taken on the challenge of language education, focusing on English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese.  The app is being test marketed to varying age levels and has received enthusiastic responses.  You can help support Tiny Factory and language education on Lingual’s kickstarter campaign through November 9th.

Check out this video to get you excited:

Adiós, Goodbye, Zai hui

Michael Sacca founded Tiny Factory in 2009. Tiny Factory is an application design and development company based in San Diego. Currently, They’re focusing on building apps for the language education community. Bilingual Child is available in the App Store, and Lingual will be released December 2012.

{Photo by  flickingerbrad}

Earlier last week I had to write my first post on my new blog – Besos – for Babble as one of their new Voices. As I tried to introduce myself to that new audience, I kept coming back to the label of nonconformist which was given to me by my high school friends when the class superlatives were announced. There I was, right under the title of “Class Nonconformist.”

No, I wasn’t thrilled with it at all, but over the years I’ve learned to embrace that seemingly negative trait and realized just how happy I am to not meet everyone’s expectations of how things “should” be. Check out my Babble Voices article and you’ll get to know my nonconformist self just a bit more.

After that bit of self exploration, and reading the many comments from other women (and men) applauding and coming out as nonconformists themselves, I realized that all of us here are nonconformists just by the fact that we’ve decided to gift our children with a second (or more) language. Wouldn’t you agree?

Why are we nonconformists?

We’re nonconformists because we won’t believe any of the myths thrown our way by those who seem to know better than we do and have never read or researched the plethora of facts surrounding the incredible benefits of the bilingual brain.

We’re nonconformists because we will go out of our way to find the books, music, apps and toys that will enrich our kid’s lives with the sounds of our language of choice.

We’re nonconformists because, if given the choice, we will ignore the ignorants who claim bilingual education fails the system and we will do everything we can to enroll our child in a dual-language immersion program.

We’re nonconformists because we don’t care if others think it’s rude we’re not speaking to our kids in English when out in public. We are focused on our kid’s language learning and immersion process and not the other’s insecurities.

We’re nonconformists because we won’t let society dictate that one language is all we need; we know bilingual is better.

I’d love to hear from you on this one. Do you feel you’re a nonconformist? Why or why not? Let’s start this conversation and continue leading this #BilingualKids movement together.