It’s that time of year again when you receive your child’s school report. For some parents and carers, understanding what it means can be challenging. Some children will be happy and others may be disappointed.

We often hear about the benefits of reading storybooks at bedtime for promoting vocabulary, early literacy skills, and a good relationship with your child. But the experts haven’t been in your home, and your child requests the same book every single night, sometimes multiple times a night. You both know all the words off by heart.

Hi! You didn’t come here to avoid studying, did you? Well, at least you’ll learn how to study better when you’re done with this little break. These are Lifehacker’s most popular study tips from the last five years.

You no longer need to be a Harvard student or Princeton grad to benefit from instruction at these exclusive institutions. You can access some of their most popular classes online via MOOCs.

Drawing is hard. Even after a lesson with a New Yorker cartoonist, I get spooked by the simplest drawing exercises.

Coding school App Academy has opened a free online interactive version of its 12-week curriculum. That’s a pretty good deal, since the Academy’s in-person classes in San Francisco and New York can cost as much as a semester in university. The online version involves less direct human interaction, but it includes online mentors and access to a community Slack chat.

It's no secret that you can get some crazy-good software for the sweet price of zero dollars, if you're a student. For novice developers looking for a step up in their coding game, JetBrains offers its entire range free, if you're currently studying.

You should listen to more than one history podcast. But if you have pick just one, pick In Our Time, the venerable BBC radio show and podcast that covers a different topic each episode. It’s your best opportunity to learn a little bit about a lot of things. And it’s the best way to figure out what parts of history really interest you, for further learning.

The final Nobel winner of 2018 has been announced, and it isn’t you. How do you get your own Nobel (which includes $1.4 million and a medal)? Well, for that you’d have to significantly contribute to the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine or economics; reach a high point in an impressive literary career; or perform humanitarian acts on a The Good Place level.

But if you want to just get nominated, you could beg someone on the nominating committee to name you.

We’re all used to skimming past the boring parts of a reading assignment or a web article. But when researchers from RMIT University printed information in a weird, hard-to-read font, they found that people were more likely to remember what they read.

Right now, the Australian comics community is producing some of the best original work in the world. Australian comics punch above their weight globally. Many have been picked up by international publishers and nominated for international and national literary awards - yet remain little known at home. Some are directed at an adult audience; some are for all ages. They tackle issues ranging from true crime to environmental ruin to life in detention.

Indeed.com defines the best jobs for job seekers as those with the combination of best pay and employer demand. And while lots of sexier roles get lots of attention, Indeed found jobs in traditional sectors, such as education, health and construction - as well as several areas in tech - satisfied those criteria most.

When kids are between two and four, they're bubbling with questions — preschool children ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day. (My daughter seems to ask this many on the drive to school — How do the cars stay in the lines? Who makes the lights change colours? Why don't they make a wall so the bicycles can't get hit? Why do motorcycles get to go in front of us? She is very much into the inner-workings of street traffic these days.)

The Great Gatsby is overrated. It’s a good book! A great book! It’s just not the very best book ever, especially not the best book to teach teenagers about the power of literature. If it were, then teens wouldn’t celebrate the glamour that the book tries to deconstruct. But it’s stuck in the high school literary canon, along with Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. And at this point it seems like the main reason it’s taught to every high schooler is because it was taught to all the teachers, and no one’s bothered to check if it’s still the best choice.

There is magic in stories. We all remember hearing them as children, and we loved them. Imaginary adventures set in faraway places. Tales about how the dishwasher isn’t working. It doesn’t matter! Whether made up by parents or read from books, kids love to hear stories.

There are as many ways to learn to code as there are ways to use your coding ability. You can learn it from college courses, books, online resources — or from one of several growing boot camps for developers of all ages. We talked to the founders of two such boot camps: David Graham of Code Ninjas, for kids 7–14 and Michael Choi of Coding Dojo, for teens and adults. They explained their different approaches, both of which give their students the ability to build their own applications.

Reading with your kids is important. We all know this. If you're like me, you dive into book after book with abandon.

I should warn you, you’re about to waste a lot of time learning useless trivia. Wikipedia contributors have compiled a list of “unusual articles” — really just articles about unusual things — and the list alone is over 27,000 words long. We’ve collected over 80 of our favourites.

Think about a book you read last year. How much of it do you remember? Could you list 10 things you learned from it? Can you even remember what books you read last year?