Science has been a passion of mine ever science High School.  It is a passion that has served me well in another of my interests—cooking. There are very strong links between cooking and science; both involve measuring, testing, and experimentation.  The art of cooking is the management of physical and chemical reactions with a healthy dose of experimentation thrown in.  We have all found ourselves in the situation where we are missing that one ingredient needed to complete a recipe and have then decided to make a substitution, creating our own mini-experiment in the process.

Television Chief Alton Brown leveraged this kitchen science connection when he presented recipes in a new way on his extremely education television show.  Recently, I discovered that the science of cooking has been taken to a whole new level when I read a book called “What Einstein Told His Cook,” by Robert Wolke.  As both a professor of chemistry and a keen cook, Robert dives into the science of the kitchen with gusto.  From whether you should add salt or oil to boiling pasta water to the latest scientific research on juicing limes, he blends the science of cooking with funny anecdotes and explains concepts in easy-to-understand terms.  A lot of what we do in the kitchen is learned through experience, but as Robert shows it is all founded in really interesting science.

I often recommend cooking as an educational activity when parents ask me how to engage their children in science at home.  Getting the children involved in the process of cooking is a perfect way to encourage their natural curiosity while also helping them develop experimental technique.  Food after all, is very motivational.  From measuring a cup of sugar to melting chocolate, kitchen chemistry is a great way to introduce children to and promote the process of experimentation.  Do not underestimate the educational power of allowing a young child to dissolve sugar and salt in separate glasses of water and then having them taste it.  Careful measuring, watching batter turn into cake, or adding lemon juice to avocadoes to stop them from browning, this is all great science opportunities that can be a springboard to further learning.  Best of all, this is science that you can eat.

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

I love that old cliché that references the “less academic” offerings that many institutions of learning have offered over the years. Although the actual course may never have existed, as an idiom it carries a good amount of meaning for us as a society. The courses to which the term “Underwater Basket Weaving” refers offered some guilty pleasures for many of us in our educational journeys, and sometimes they may have even turned out to be genuine learning experiences. I took a number of painting courses in graduate school, and although they did not fulfill any core requirements, nor get me much closer to the goal of graduation, they did offer a tremendous outlet, and an opportunity to use other portions of my brain (even if for just a few hours a week). But somewhere along the line I also learned how to paint.

Today’s internet is headed in a direction where there are sometimes more “Underwater Basket Weaving” distractions than there is “Core” (read as “Important” or “Valuable”) information. Web 2.0 (or the “Read/Write Web”), with all of its interactive and user-generated content opportunities seems to be taking even further down that path. It’s incredibly easy to find information about, gather instruction on, watch videos pertaining to, and join discussions dissecting just about anything anyone is interested in. Heck, I could learn enough about any hobby of mine to research, write and publish a virtual book in an afternoon (and yes, this is me presenting a pure, unadulterated plug for my April 23rd post).

With all these distractions, your might ask, how can I really learn anything truly important? Well, that actually might be just the point–although formal learning certainly needs to have goals, objectives and even assessments to make sure you everyone’s getting where we’d hoped they would, perhaps the informal learning opportunities that present themselves in life could also be just as real and just as important to us. Perhaps “getting lost” in topic we love on the internet, and drinking in content and sharing thoughtful feedback about that content really . . . is . . . learning. And what if that learning could be done with a subject matter expert as a guide by our side? That should be, I believe, one of the major goals with the next evolution of eLearning. And that’s just the kind of experience I hope my kids get during the course of their education, and if it takes me turning my head to the occasional “Underwater Basket Weaving”-type of experience that I may at some point believe that my children are engaging in, then so be it.

Next month our 2009 Summer Camp program starts. This month, we sent over 1200 pages of curriculum to print. Our ideas from the last twelve months have finally coalesced into lesson plans and experiments. With shiny new curriculum in front of me, it’s always a good time to pause and consider our program goals.  If I were forced to distill our curriculum into just one word, that word would be FUN!

My eighteen years of teaching has taught me that learning can and should be fun! Too often learning can be considered as a chore, like eating green leafy vegetables; it is something you do for the benefits, but not your first choice. Intuitively, we all know that you get better results when learning is made fun. Think about the last time you got swept away in a program on the Discovery Channel or innocently sat down at a computer and Googled a topic, only to look up and discover an hour has flashed by.  You know that when a topic is fun, it drives your interest, and guess what?  It no longer feels like learning.

To make learning fun you need two elements, relevance and play. We are all natural learners. It is after all how we progress from an infant to an adult. It is important to capitalize upon this natural curiosity by making the topic relevant and interesting. For play students should be empowered to be able to direct their own learning through games, creativity, or experiments. Students will not readily learn about electricity just because it will be on a test. They can, however, be engaged by the fact that electricity is secretly powering their video games and be motivated to experiment and build a flashlight they can use to secretly read comics under their blankets.

At Champions Science Adventures, fun is at the core of all our lessons. If we make the process of learning science fun, we then make science itself fun and hopefully more appealing to our students.

Andy Allen

“The Science Wiz”

Earlier this past week, we had one of “those” mornings at our house, where everything seemed to go in slow motion, and we were thus forced to make that obligatory dash for the bus. Although my son’s stop is just a few houses down the street, it has proven more effective to jump in the car for that happy chase. This time, though, we had cut it so close that I nearly had to run the bus off the road to get him to notice us and not drive away. Although I certainly could have driven him the 20 extra blocks or so in to school, I think that my competitive drive seems to kick in during this mini race.

Anyway, I digress; so, I sent him on his way, and took just a minute to let my heart rate slow down a bit before jumping on the highway to head in to work, and it gave me a moment to think. I remembered being a kid up in the mountains, and waiting (hoping) for the bus to get stuck on the switchbacks during one of our big snowy mornings. Although many memories that I have of the bus are less than pleasant (the terrible smell for weeks after a kid gets sick on the bus, or getting “moved” to the front of the bus by the older kids), the many hours I spent on the bus as a kid really did teach me some pretty powerful lessons about playing nice with others, reading people, and when to know to not push authority (i.e. the bus driver) too far.

Where I’m really driving this train (or bus) is towards a bigger question about being a kid and gathering many of the big childhood learning neccessities (i.e. knowledge, skills AND attitudes). Although I am (of course) a huge proponent of the online delivery of learning and information, I always try to keep it in the back of my head that kids also need to have very real experiences to learn and grow; and, although many of life’s experiences can be recreated in synchronous and asynchronous online events, experiences like riding the bus 5 days a week for 10 long years of one’s life can be difficult to recreate, so there is clearly a need for a good balance. I suppose the real point is that I feel it’s my responsibility to keep that idea in the back of my mind at all times when I’m creating these fun and/or academic events for children.

Although I’m not sure if we’ll ever catch the bus, I sure am enjoying chase!

Welcome! My name is Andy Allan and I oversee the creation of the Champions Science Adventures program. Our enrichment program believes the best way to learn science is though hands-on discovery, actually doing science.

Recently, I got to do some very cool hands-on science for television. I was interviewed by fourteen morning news shows concerning the importance of science education and how our program makes science learning interesting and fun. This media blast was part of a series of fun events around the country to kick off Science Adventures Summer Camps. The news programs were located all around the United States, but luckily I only had to make one trip for my interviews. Using the power of satellite technology, I was able to stay in one place and beam my science experiments around the country.

Once in the studio, I was joined by three elementary students who became my science assistants. They helped me demonstrate three experiments and showcase just how motivational and exciting science learning can be. Together we made atomic green-glowing slime, made a cup of water disappear using some science magic, and set in motion an oscillating chemical reaction that swung back-and-forth from bright yellow to blue. These experiments not only got my three assistants excited and engaged, but also grabbed the attention of the news anchors. It is always a lot of fun to teach science, and being on camera with the children doing the experiments was a great way to showcase the fundamentals of how Science Adventures teaches science in its programs around the country. I think we definitely brightened the morning for quite a few people and got both the news anchors and their viewers to think a little more about how the world around them works.

Click here to learn about experiments you can do at home.

We spent the morning together discovering some interesting things about the Champions (including hunting down the Coyote tracks out back). Please take a look at the magazine/book that we composed from our adventures and interviews during our time together!

http://www.tikatok.com/book/viewShared/title/everybody-works-001/code/58c8c1469e8d22063c6f5b750a89b86f

With Easter weekend having come and gone, many of us have fresh memories of kids running frantically through the yard, hunting down those little platic capsules of sugar energy. The dedication and tunnel-visioned effort that kids put into finding those hidden holiday treasures is almost awe-inspiring, and it makes me wish that we could tap into that same gusto in the learning process. Well, why can’t we?

I built a “virtual scavenger hunt” in an online course that I was developing some time ago and received some rave reviews from the students following the activity. I hid little clues throughout the weekly content of the course, and then gave the students a list of items to find, and sent them on their way. They gathered the breadcrumb, and brought them back at the end of the week in lieu of a more formal assessment. Although I didn’t have the chance to fully analyze the outcomes for that week versus the other weeks (the sample size was pretty small), the very positive reactions that I received spoke to something even deeper–i.e. the activity seems to have reenergized the learning process through the spice of variety.

Tapping into that natural human propensity to hunt and gather seems to be a pretty powerful tool; moreover, though, tapping into new ways of presenting learning materials so that the end users (the learners) remain attentive and engaged is a perpetually exciting and energizing experience.

Anyway, I guess real the take-away here is that the educators need to make the “eggs” good, and the learners will keep coming back to hunt for more.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking lately about how to get users of all ages excited about learning and engaged with the information that we are presenting to them. Between Science Adventures, the Online Math program, our engaging Before and After school programs, and our other Academic Offerings, we really already offer an interesting and engaging range of educational and enrichment-type activities; but, what does the next generation of Champions look like? Should we offer exciting Science opportunities that ignore geographic boarders, and allow children from coast to coast to learn together and share their discoveries? Do we extend the Math opportunities into the realm of games and social sharing? Do we extend our other academic offerings into the digital arena too?

We are very excited about the future of teaching and learning, and so are investigating all sorts of avenues. If you had your “perfect learning world” what would you want to see Champions offer, and how would you like to see it offered? On the computer? In person? Pushed out to mobile phones? Through a microblogging service like Twitter? A combination of all those options?

We want to hear your thoughts, please don’t hesitate to share your comments!

Over the past weekend my family and I took a quick spring break road trip to a little touristy mountain town not far from where we live. Although we were only 1.5 hours from our front door, we got a hotel room for a few nights and immersed ourselves in the local attractions to really immerse ourselves in the vacation feeling. Admittedly, though, I have a five year old son and a baby girl, so just staying in a hotel with a pool was probably enough to create the full simulacra experience for them.

Anyway, we visited an ancient Native American cliff dwelling site, toured a cave with stalactites, stalagmites and columns (a term that I only learned during the visit to the cave, but one that my son surprisingly knew from his pre-trip homework with mom on the cave website), and even ate at a “real” Colorado pirate restaurant. Although the destinations were less than exotic, our family showed an innate ability to let go of the regular grind and immerse itself in vacationland, even if for just a few days.

With that all said (and in the spirit of bringing this post back down to an educational ground) watching the ways in which my son gathered and processed new data while in that less structured “vacation mode” was fascinating. The learning that he did was truly experiential, and the freedom with which he immersed himself in new experiences was inspiring. By watching a group of older boys and girls, he mastered the cannon ball in the pool within about three tries (back in swimming class he would have likely waited for permission and/or recognition from the instructor); in the cave tour, he stepped up and volunteered all kinds of information about the different strata and formations–knowledge that he had mastered on the fly in excited anticipation of the trip; at the cave dwellings, he noticed drawings on the wall, and notches in the rocks that I never would have caught, and he then offered his own personal explanations for what they likely meant or were used for. Never once did he second guess himself, and he was always happy to hear the information that I or my wife could gather from the signs posted throughout the place.

Although I very much understand the need for accountability in education, watching a young mind grasp on to unexpected learning opportunities is almost awe-inspiring. I suppose that what I take with me from these musings is that we have to try, at all costs, to allow children to learn through decision-making, discovery and even serendipity. And, whatever we can do to infuse those possibilities into the very structured world of educational learning, the better we’ll all likely be.

KNOWLEDGE LEARNING CORPORATION® UNVEILS CHAMPIONS® BRAND

(Littleton, CO) – April 1, 2009 – Today, Knowledge Learning Corporation®, announced its KLC School Partnerships® division, will rebrand to Champions®. Under the new brand, Champions®, which offers before and afterschool, academic intervention and science enrichment programs, will be able to more effectively communicate its broad range of education solutions available to school districts nationwide.

“Our robust portfolio of academic enrichment offerings provides a wide range of solutions to help school districts meet their education goals,” said Shelley Lambert, Vice President of Operations.  “Under KLC School Partnerships®, name recognition across our programs wasn’t resonating well with our clients. Our new streamlined brand identity will help communicate our commitment to developing academic ‘champions’ through high-quality curriculum that empowers our students to become successful by exploring new opportunities and new ways of learning every day.”

Champions® three product lines include Champions Extended LearningTM, Champions Science AdventuresTM and Champions AcademyTM, programs providing innovative, fun and high-quality hands-on learning experiences in math, science, reading and tutoring.  The Champions Extended Learning TM program offers students before and after school extended day programs and care. Champions Science Adventures TM programs and summer camps focus on taking science education out of the classroom to spark a child’s interest in the world of science and discovery. The Champions Academy TM program offers academic intervention programs in math and reading – including Champions Online Tutoring TM, the newest Champions® offering, addressing unique math needs of children in grades 4-8.

With nearly three decades of experience, Champions® provides customized on-site and distance learning programs that address the remedial needs of students, reinforce classroom learning, build school capabilities through teacher training and promote family involvement.  Last year, Champions® provided educational services to more than 55,000 students in 20 states.

For more information visit www.discoverchampions.com.

###

About Champions®:  Champions®, formerly known as KLC School Partnerships®, is the nation’s leading provider of extended learning, enrichment and targeted academic intervention solutions that address specific school and community needs. Its customized education programs include Champions Extended Learning TM before and after school programs; Champions Academy TM reading and math tutoring; and Champions Science Adventures TM hands-on science camps and after school clubs for school-age children. Together, these initiatives are offered at more than 650 sites in 20 states, serving nearly 55,000 students annually. Champions® is a division of Knowledge Learning Corporation®, the nation’s largest early childhood and school-age education and care provider. Champions’ main office is located in Littleton, Colorado.

About Knowledge Learning Corporation®: Knowledge Learning Corporation® is a leading national early childhood and school-age education and care company, serving more than 250,000 children in the United States and the District of Columbia. Knowledge Learning Corporation’s business lines include early childhood education and care operating under the KinderCare® Learning Centers, Knowledge Beginnings®, CCLC® brands as the nation’s leading private provider of early childhood education and care through approximately 1,800 community-based centers and employer partnerships; Champions®, a leading provider of pre-K-12 supplemental educational solutions, operating more than 600 programs nationwide across core offerings including Champions® before- and after-school programs, summer camps and academic science programs; and affiliated with KC Distance Learning TM, a leading provider of online learning solutions to school districts and online high school courses directly to families through Keystone National High School TM, the nation’s largest online high school. For more information, visit www.knowledgelearning.com.