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.
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.
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.
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.
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.