project-based-learning
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Suryanarayanan Paneerselvam and the education that starts after the degree
He left an engineering job in America to help engineers in India put their knowledge to work. Skill-Lync grew from after-hours lessons into a funded business, bringing a larger test of the promise that started it.
Brendan Manley Started by Taking a Game Apart
Before he co-founded iCAMP, Brendan Manley was a new programmer trying to reconstruct a game on his subway ride. The same curiosity would take him from software to summer camp, school partnerships, and back to software again.
Nobel Learning PBC: Your next teacher could be you
Nobel Navigators turns students into facilitators, then asks them to help the next group learn. Its free global internship makes teamwork something you practise, with people you have actually met.
Mark Naufel and the education of a builder
A childhood computer led Mark Naufel into student government, a student-run invention lab, and Axio. Now the University of Silicon Valley president is taking his belief in learning by building to an entire institution.
The Website That Kept the Mistakes
Instructables began as a way for engineers to remember how a kite-surfing experiment was made. Twenty-one years later, its real product is still the same: a usable account of what happened between the idea and the finished thing.
The Degree Wasn’t the Education
Skill-Lync began with two engineers discovering that a degree could leave them unprepared for engineering. Their remedy - projects, simulations and proof of work - became a global classroom, then a caution about the cost of growing one too quickly.
MDB builds apps. The contracts buy lunch.
At Berkeley, a student development club connects paid software work with an unusually practical education. The small details - a name game, a lunch vote, eleven project milestones - explain how.
VADA put a design studio inside a public high school
At Santa Barbara High School, about 225 students combine academic coursework with art and design. VADA’s new studio makes that arrangement tangible - and its funding and admissions reveal what it takes to keep it public.
David Lipkin Is Building a Report Card for What Students Can Actually Do
The musician, former clinician, and Vermont founder behind LiFT Learning has spent a decade turning student agency from a hopeful slogan into the daily machinery of school.
Lulu Manley Built the Camp Her Children Couldn’t Find
A Southampton real estate agent noticed a missing piece in her children’s world. Seven years later, the hands-on STEAM program she built with her husband had reached 100 schools - and found a national home.
The Kids' Camp That Turned Screen Time Into Shop Class - Then Sold Its Playbook
Lulu and Brendan Manley built the camp they wanted for their own children, survived a pandemic that arrived just as demand appeared, and expanded into more than 100 schools. The clever bit was never teaching kids to consume more technology - it was giving them tools and asking them to make something.
The Vermont couple who quit teaching to grade the thing school forgot to measure: skills
Two rural-Vermont teachers who married, raised three kids, and got tired of watching school reward compliance over ability built software that swaps letter grades for a portfolio of proof.
CL Global Academy
CL Global Academy is an independent international education company that runs academically rigorous, project-based short courses in the heart of Cambridge, UK. Founded in 2009 by Allen Hao and Katrina, it hosts residential programmes inside historic Cambridge colleges - taught by University of Cambridge-affiliated lecturers - covering fields from AI and data science to innovation and entrepreneurship. The Academy welcomes over 1,500 students a year and counts more than 24,000 alumni across 16 years, having grown into a multi-million-dollar business without institutional venture funding.
Generation Citizen
Generation Citizen is a national nonprofit that brings action-oriented civics education into middle and high school classrooms. Founded as a 2008 student project at Brown University, it partners with schools and districts to run a project-based curriculum in which students identify a local issue, research it, and take real civic action - then present their work at community 'Civics Day' showcases. The organization also advocates for state and federal policy that funds equitable civic learning. It has reached more than 250,000 students and, in recent years, serves roughly 25,000 students annually across 150+ schools in eight states.
Polygence
Polygence is an online research mentorship platform that pairs ambitious high school students one-on-one with PhD-level mentors from institutions like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Oxford to design and complete an independent research project over roughly 10 sessions. Founded in 2019 by two Stanford PhDs, Janos Perczel and Jin Chow, it turns curiosity into tangible outcomes - published papers, apps, novels, podcasts - and gives students a distinctive credential for college applications. The company now spans a network of 2,000+ mentors across 40+ fields and runs a biannual Symposium of Rising Scholars where students present their work to a global audience.
Kelly Smith
Kelly Smith is the founder and CEO of Prenda, a Mesa, Arizona education company that helps ordinary adults run microschools - small groups of 5 to 10 kids who take ownership of their own learning. An MIT-trained nuclear fusion engineer who once sold a clean-energy software business, Smith stumbled into education by volunteering at a library code club, watching kids light up when they wanted to learn. In January 2018 he started a microschool around his kitchen table with his son and six neighborhood kids. Since then Prenda has helped more than 1,000 adults launch microschools and nearly 10,000 K-8 students learn to lead their own education.
Janos Perczel
Janos Perczel is a theoretical quantum physicist turned education entrepreneur. After earning a PhD from MIT working on invisibility cloaks and cold-atom quantum systems under Mikhail Lukin at Harvard, he co-founded Polygence in 2019 with Jin Chow. The company pairs high school students with PhD mentors for one-on-one research projects, and now reaches tens of thousands of students worldwide. As CEO he has pushed Polygence into AI, releasing TeachLM, a language model fine-tuned on 100,000 hours of real one-on-one tutoring data.
Practera
Practera is an Australian-born education technology company that helps universities, employers and governments run real-world learning programs at scale. Its SaaS platform lets educators design, deliver and assess experiential programs - internships, industry projects, mentoring and micro-credentials - while AI-powered analytics flag struggling learners and measure outcomes. The flagship product of Intersective, Practera connects students with authentic industry work to build the skills employers actually want.
Prenda
Prenda is an Arizona-based education company that gives everyday adults - called guides - the software, curriculum, training, and support to open and run small, tuition-free K-8 microschools of 5 to 10 students out of homes, libraries, and community spaces. Founded by Kelly Smith after he started a learning club around his kitchen table, Prenda partners with state-credentialed institutions and school-choice programs so families pay little or nothing, while students learn at their own pace through a 'connect, conquer, collaborate, create' day built around mastery and student agency.
Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.