"Once upon a time there was a great civilization called Alttopia. Alttopians were great artists and engineers, but they were surrounded by hostile barbarians. They had to build a castle with mazes, traps and defense systems to protect their art work and treasures..."
When he was 12, my son Samuel came up with the above adventure story-line as the theme for building a gamified-learning community using Minecraft Redstone. He's been doing gamified and project-based learning in the past few years, and now at age 14, he's the team lead of a RPG game development project, also started building a quantum-trading system after getting his data science certification from UC Berkeley.
Samuel's experience inspired many kids in China. For example, last year alone, more than a dozen middle-school-age kids, some of them his good friends, followed his foot-steps and also got data science certification from UC Berkeley. During the process, Samuel tutored many of them and shared his knowledge and experience with them. Some of these kids found their talents and passion, some fell in love with doing research and case-studies using data science, and some decided to go for computer science and AI as their major in college.
Unlike most other kids in China, Samuel is a home-school kid and has a lot of time and freedom to pursue his hobbies and interest. He constantly learns and practices many valuable skills that can only be experienced thru real-world projects and problems, while traditional schools are good at textbook knowledge and taking exams.
I must attribute Samuel's successful learning experience to the long-time guidance from a few top-notch mentors - John, chief engineer from Build-It-Yourself.com, Brent, found of ImageLucidity, and Michael, senior consultant from McKensey.
What do John, Brent and Michael have in common? They are all subject-matter-experts of their professions. They are the best mentors for Samuel and kids alike.
Samuel's learning model can be summarized as -
self-learning + real-world projects + subject-matter-experts as mentors
self-learning + real-world projects + subject-matter-experts as mentors
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A few years ago, I learned the story of Elon Musk's Ad Astra school - When Musk's five sons were in Kindergarten, he spent a long time trying to find an elementary school for them. As the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and Nuralink - companies who tap into futuristic technologies, he came to the conclusion that the traditional schooling model would make it difficult for kids to acquire the skills required by future jobs. He quickly decided to build his own school for the kids, and he hired subject-matter-experts - engineers, scientists, artists, etc., to guide the kids thru real-world projects.
I then said to myself, "Wow! This should be the learning model for my kids!" I took action, and over the past few years, I gradually built a network of mentors and subject-matter-experts of various fields, to mentor Samuel thru real-world projects. And many kids have joined us and are discovering their passion, developing valuable skills, and some even use their skills to work on commercial products, start a business and earn money, just like Samuel.
The reason why real-world projects are more effective learning for kids, is that when facing those unpredictable real-world problems, kids are forced to exercise their problem-solving skills and creativity. For example, when Samuel took the task of setting up the commercial game server that a number of kids were waiting for, he was naturally self-motivated to begin with, and he learned the server setup process, solved any problems he ran into, searched and reached out to subject-matter-experts for help, and he worked day-and-night to complete the task. This process trained him in many valuable skills - self-initiative, online research for solutions, in-depth analysis and problem-solving, interaction with the pros, and the determination to finish a task before its deadline with ownership of responsibility. These are all the necessary skills required for real-world projects of professional level.
Although I am not quite ready to follow Elon Musk to mars yet, I realized if I just follow his philosophy when it comes to our kids' education, I would be doing the best thing for my kids.
So here I am. I am not Elon Musk, but I have created something similar to Ad Astra, a mentorship network where kids are building long-term relationship with world-class mentors, and have the freedom to do projects that they love.
I present to you this mentorship network -
Ricky Lee,
Founder, Alttopia Mentorship Network
P.S.
1. Alt means growth; topia means paradise or a perfect place.
2. Recently Harvard and a number of top universities in the US are dropping SAT/ACT exams scores as admission requirements. They claimed that such standard tests cannot reflect a student's creativity and problem-solving skills, which are the top two most-wanted skills by employers. Are universities learning from Elon Musk as well? Well, if the universities want their graduates to be hired by top companies like SpaceX, Nuralink or Tesla, then it makes sense that they start paying attention to what Elon Musk is doing with education.