You can't get more "virtual" credentials than this: Salman Khan started the wildly popular Khan Academy to bring down-to-earth mathematics lectures to anyone, anywhere. Aragon Burlingham founded the We Teach Science Foundation to empower engineers and scientists to assist and work with math and science teachers and students -- both in the classroom and through virtual tutoring.
But when Khan and Burlingham met through a mutual friend, they had an idea that may sound old-school: a summer math camp.
What's different is how they're doing it.
"We want to change the actual physical experience and compliment the virtual thing with human interaction," Khan explains. "From our point of view, our summer camp is a lab for some of our ideas. From the kids' point of view, it's a real tangible kind of exploration of the world, it's a real way to connect the abstraction that you get in the classroom with real world experience and see why it's really fun."
The experience starts with a beautiful setting in Portola Valley, and from there, Khan and Burlingham teach the kids how to have fun, and learn from it.
"The funny thing is we work as hard as we can but we spend half the time outdoors," Khan says. "We have kids take free throws from different distances and we go inside and model it. The kids love it. There's a lot of experiential learning — the kids the whole time thought they were playing but this was really hardcore stuff."
"We created these projects that created a need for background," Burlingham says of their method. "We'd start with a board game, and they'd have a decision to make and we'd break out and do the math on the white board. It was really cool that they'd remember it a few days later."
Both had the desire to make math and science real to the kids, not just the abstraction that they've been studying in school. They point out that their camp has no minimum requirement, and no test to get in. Differentiation, which is a hot topic for gifted kids in public schools, is just taken for granted.
"You don't need a 150 IQ to show up," Khan says. "You like learning and you like exploring."
Khan's videos, which started as a way to tutor his cousin long-distance, have been adopted by homeschoolers, school kids, adults, and college students worldwide. Even some schools are starting to realize how helpful this free resource can be, and Khan is happy to help.
"I think in math more than anything else differentiated learning is huge, and the current system forces everyone to go at the same pace," he explains. He also believes that the current method of pushing students through curriculum "with 80% proficiency" creates students with a poor math foundation so that problems show up later when they're getting into the higher math that causes so many students to fail.
Burlingham adds that experiential learning is more than just a label. "[Students are] not being inspired. Parallel with that is they're not being told why they need this. When children need to learn something they need to learn to apply it somewhere."
Burlingham and Khan admit that there are a lot of kids who could think of nothing they'd like less than spending summer days doing math. But they plan to help those kids change their vision.
"A lot of math phobics are scared of failure, worried about getting the wrong answer," Burlingham explains. "What we both try to promote is embrace failure — see what you've done and learn from it."
One of Burlingham's favorite memories of last year's camp was a short hike that became something much more. "We put out mental work problems as we walked. And we were just working through these mind games while we were walking, and we stopped and looked around and we were miles away from nowhere!"
At Mental Bootcamp, getting lost is just another form of success.
For more information: Visit Mental Bootcamp 2010. Visit Khan Academy. Visit the We Teach Science Foundation.
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