What an awesome thing you're doing, @curtross! I think this is how ALL education should happen and I don't understand why it takes governments and education departments so long to get that. I was 'lucky' that my kids were suited to the traditional education system but I always thought it was wrong for so many kids. In the first year of highschool, their school organised a day called maths chimps for those who did well in maths. It was an outdoor day where they built bridges, calculated the height of a tree based on the sun and its shadow, etc. etc. It was the funnest maths day of all their school years combined. And I thought, heck, why don't they just teach maths like that all the time. And most of all, for all children, especially those who struggle with the normal book methods. I'd love to see camp methods introduced in regular schooling. The outcomes would be phenomenal. Thanks for sharing!
I have a life goal of opening a school that focuses on this. Got some kinks to work out before I start drafting a proposal.
I cannot quite express in words how much I support these kinds of ideas. I like to think I'm a fairly intelligent individual, got decent grades and graduated college and all that jazz, but I found so much of my education to be absolute torture. I could barely stay awake in lectures, and I was super anxious while taking tests. But give me a puzzle that actually intrigues me and I can work at it tirelessly for hours, many times forgetting to sleep or eat regularly.
I don't think there is a problem with kids where we need to drug them up so they behave, I think there is a problem with how we teach. Different people learn different ways and at different speeds. There is enormous room for improvement in the current educational system which insists everyone learn the same subjects at the same speed in the same contexts.
Absolutely. Everyone is different. Everyone is capable of learning...not everyone is capable of learning in the same way.
Awesome, can't wait to hear about it when the time comes :)