ASB Trip: Day 3
The next stops for our trip included visits to 2 more schools, 2 companies, and having dinner at an alumni’s house!
We went to Cornerstone academy prep school first. Echoing the school’s mantra: “College prep starts at Kindergarten”, college banners hang on every classroom. Students are pronounced scholars and pushed to think and act accordingly. Setting the expectation even higher, scholars are given the responsibility of using their Google Chrome computers to do their readings and math exercises both independently and in small groups. From our Q&A with the school leaders, we learned that Cornerstone ensures the correct application of edtech by consistently coaching its teachers and providing feedback.
After wrapping up our Cornerstone visit, we headed to Cristo Rey High School — an all freshmen and sophomore school located in San Jose. For the first half, we walked around helping students revise their essays. We observed that every kid was given a chromebook for which they were free to take home if needed. When we talked to the instructor, we learned that Cristo Rey is a relatively new private school that was trying to experiment and incorporate blended learning. They way they set up their space was purposefully done to incorporate these new ideas. Overall, as a school, they were struggling to get the funding needed to hire more teachers to create more effective teaching.
Following our morning school visits, we sat down to have lunch with developers and researchers from Kidaptive — a budding edtech company that aims to build products that enhance early childhood development. According to D/r Chau, Kidaptive mainly focuses on gamification to expose children to several experiences that nurture their early neuronal connection growth. Chau also underscored that the major divergence in equity happens during this early childhood period and, hence, deserves more attention and effort.
Afterwards, we met up with the founder and CEO of LightUp. LightUp focuses on building products for the market that are available to students of young age. The founder and CEO demonstrated to us one of the build-your-own electrical circuit kits that shows in real time (through scanning the circuit), the current that flows through, which was cool to see. As of now, the kits are not available for free, and from an equity perspective, we feel that it would be much more effective if LightUp worked to reduce the price and make the kits available to schools.
The last stop for the day was having dinner with Jane Bryson— a graduate of Stanford and director of Education Consulting Services at Ed Elements. We learned about her opinions on personalized learning and her experiences of formerly working as a tutor at East Palo Alto. It was a nice close to the day and we were thankful for kindly welcoming us to her home!
