So imagine you had an opportunity in your life to consider the question of education

without looking at all of the restrictions and the complexities

that come with introducing education to a country like yours.

Imagine you lived in a mythical places like California,

where there were no laws about what kind of education you could create.

If you could imagine

the best possible place for children to learn.

If you could imagine the most incredible learning experiences day after day.

and if you could imagine starting a school with two questions in your mind -

two powerful questions that would shape how you rethought education

and those two questions:

Where does competence come from?

How do people become those kind of people that we admire,

who can take on any new challenge,

like Ahmed (Coucha)and his TEDxCairo - his little change

that was part of that revolution of Arab spring.

How do people become like Zuzana (Kierulfova) and her passion about such simple thing like mud

that transforms lives and transforms how people think about housing.

And the other question is: Are there possibly experiences that children have

that predispose them to heroic behavior later in life?

Is there something about what happens in childhood that makes you that kind of person?

So I started my summer camp with those two questions.

And this was my summer camp.

I made it for me to answer questions. This was in fact my own private laboratory

where I could experiment on other people's children.

And because it was my camp we built stuff.

This is what I do when I have time for my self

and this was a passion I could share with children, in this context.

We built a roller coaster with 20 meters, no 30 meters of track.

We built incredible cars that you power by rowing.

And as we were doing this

we started to have some fundamental realizations about how children learn.

And one of them, it seems so obvious, but it's almost gone from education - from traditional education.

And I'll tell you now and when you see it you'll remember how obvious this is.

We think with our hands.

It's true. 30% of our brains is dedicated to processing information from our hands.

Just like those cockroaches we sense the world through these and we make sense of the world through these.

Ideas that we form in our heads we often metaphorically shape with our hands.

We see the same parts of our brain light up.

And in fact, if you pick something up, you probably have something in your hand right now that you can use,

I want you to turn to the person next to you and poke them with it. Go on!

OK. Put that object down and poke them with your finger.

OK. If we had you in one of those giant machines with the magnetic doughnut

and we were looking at the activity in your brain, the exact same parts of the brain would light up

whether I poke you with the thing or I poke you with my finger.

And that's because our brains are wired for tools

- for things that we put in our hands.

When I put this in my hand

my brain reshapes

to include the end of this thing as part of my body

and it doesn't matter if this is a few centimeters long,

if it's aápencil,

or it's two meters long.

If I poke someone with a two meter stick my body is extended -

the model I have in the my brain of my very own body - is extended to the end of that stick.

You should let your children play with sticks. Itĺs good for the brain.

Such a simple idea and yet in classrooms

we ask children to sit in desks and use the exact same tools hour after hour after hour,

never getting a chance to expand their brains with the use of different tools.

We have built some amazing stuff at Tinkering School.

When you give children aáchance to

both come up with an idea, build it and test it in the real world

- to make a boat that might sink,

not just their minds but their hearts are involved in that project.

They are passionate about the result.

So we discovered a new idea:

Create a meaningful experience and the learning will follow!

What that means is that if you focus first, before you even think about curriculum,

before you worry about math, reading, writing

if you focus on designing the experience the rest of it you get for free.

So what would a school be like

if it came from a place where children could build airplanes and fly them?

My little summer camp became famous

and I got to speak on the main stage at TED.

This was a transformative moment for me.

My little camp which I ran at my house

became world famous.

I got invited to speak to educators around the world about this little idea.

And s I spoke to them I realized there were parts missing from my idea.

It couldn't be aáschool. I had some good parts and I had some bad parts.

And working with these educators in places literally as far away as Bahrain

and as close to home as San Francisco - my nearest city -

these incredible people shared these ideas and we put together something

that made sense.

And I want you to know I'm not an educator by training. I come from the world of computer technology.

Iáused to manage and innovation group at Adobe,

which was a great job and I left it for this.

So I'm the guy who teaches children

how to make perfectly round balls of sand.

And now I'm going to make them out of mud.

But this idea that we started to frame with these educators

was big and complicated.

And in order to understand it I had to draw it,

because that's how I think and Iĺm gonna draw it for you right now.

So, if the standard traditional pedagogical unit of a traditional school

is that day divided into these forty five minute periods -

a little bit of math, a little bit of science, a little bit of history, a little bit aálunch,

a little bit of physical education, ...

If that's how we think of children's education now

I want you to consider a new pedagogical unit.

We call it the Arc.

Every Arc has aátheme -

a guiding idea which shapes

how we create the education for the children.

For this example Iĺm going to use wind.

Wind - such a common element of our lives,

but if we look at it closely, there's so much that we can explore

and that's what we do.

We call this first phase of the Arc EXPLORATION.

and in this phase we create aálandscape for the children to explore

and we populate this landscape with ideas about wind

that are represented by actual people and things.

Learning should be tangible.

So we invite somebody in who generates power using wind. You guys do a lot of that here.

We invite somebody who uses wind to transport goods around the world or studied how that happened.

We bring in artists who work with wind to create sculptures.

We bring scientists in who study the meteorological sources of wind and the effects of wind.

And through this landscape we take the children on aájourney.

They meet these people, they work with these ideas, they see the actual thing in real life.

We leave the school all the time.

The children become inspired by these ideas and we capture that inspiration.

They work with a collaborator - an adult what you would call aáteacher - to create aádeclaration.

This declaration is the transition from our EXPLORATION phase into a new phase.

Each of these declarations is aáclear statement

about what they intend to build, or do, or practice, or learn about in this next phase.

We call this phase EXPRESSION.

This is not just about building.

It could be theater, it could be singing, it could be writing, it could be anything,

but we want them to express some new understanding about wind.

A design build practice to create aánew kind of a windmill.

The exploration of aáhypothesis about the effect of wind in a certain environment - a micro climate.

A series of practicing of writing and performing songs and building a stage ends in a performance

that the kids have created about wind.

That performance happens in the last Arc... I mean the last phase of our Arc.

We call it EXPOSITION - a chance to show the world their understanding of wind.

We open the doors of the school and strangers flood in.

They come from other schools, they are friends of the experts that we've been working with,

they are friends of the parents and they are the parents themselves

and we put on aáshow.

We have a science museum of wind. We have aápoetry museum of wind.

And then all of that notes and progress and the daily reflections get compiled together to create -

in a moment of reflection -

aáportfolio.

A clear description of what they learned in this project, the decisions that they made and the kinds of things they tried.

This portfolio,over the course of their lives at my school,

begins to accumulate projects and when they graduate, if they started with us in kindergarten,

they'll have done 60 projects taken from that moment of inspiration all the way to completion.

We give this back to them when they walk out the door and they take that right to aáuniversity.

We've contacted some of the highest universities in the United States,

explained how our school works and they say: Yes!

We will take those people who know how to get things done,

how of work with their own ideas.

So you're asking yourself: What does a school like this really look like?

Let's have a peak at Brightworks.

Last night I collected images that were put on our blog for Wednesday.

This is a peek into our school three days ago.

We're in the end of an EXPRESSION phase.

Here's Alexander, cutting a piece of steel to be the axle of a seven person

peddle powered camper where that children will sleep

and drive the camper themselves on a three day camping trip next week.

Here's his brother Daniel working with one of the experts in bicycle design who has come in to share his time with children.

Twenty hours over the course of this EXPLORATION I mean EXPRESSION phrase.

Here's their teammate Zada working to shape and take the sharp edges off that piece of steel.

Zada is ten years old.

Here are the youngest children of our school - 6 and 7 years old working on creating eggs - paper machete eggs -

for a play that they're doing about the life cycle of birds.

Lola and Bruno.

Here are the kids going to lunch. They've decided to bring the chickens

that the youngest children hatched as part of their exploration of the life cycle of birds.

Theyĺre taking them to the park because the chickens don't get enough outdoor time.

Here are ten, eleven -

sorry nine, ten and eleven year olds

rehearsing a play that they've been working on now for two weeks.

In order to do the play, because there are special effects involved, they had to create their own theater.

This is a 400 pound stage it took the entire school to lower to the ground.

Having put it down they had to immediately test it.

Occasionally,

when you look at your own pedagogy, you have to know when to put it aside.

So we have this phrase we use sometimes in our school:

ôScrew the Arc, make the cheese!ö

We invented this because a few weeks ago we had an opportunity to work with the world-famous cheese maker.

It didn't fit into our Arc,

which was around the topic of locomotion - energy applied to move in aásingle direction.

What does that have to do with cheese?

Absolutely nothing!

But you cannot say no when you have an opportunity to meet with someone

who can explain to children the history of cheese in four hours and

in doing so make cheese with children.

Similarly, when it became apparent that the little eggs were starting to hatch,

for those chickens that we were taking to the park,

the children demanded and organized an overnight vigil to watch those eggs hatch.

For the first time in our history almost all of the student body slept in the school.

The next day - aácelebration, and one baby chick.

Educators come from around the world to visit our school. This is Steve Davee

from the world-famous Opal School in Portland in the North America.

Climbing on a structure built by twelve year olds

who had just recently raised these giant tree trunks up against the wall

and then screened two-by-fours to them to create a bike rack.

The bike rack never came into existence - it was too much fun to climb.

We treat the city as an extension of our school.

Using bicycles and buses we are trying to get the children to see the world as a place of learning.

This is our school and this is our dream. We make a lot of mistakes.