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December 10, 2019 2021-03-29 23:11Home Page
TRAIN YOUR CHILD FOR SUCCESS!
Braintrain offers live, project-based learning activities for kids ages 8-14. Our focus is on training 21st century skills such as creativity, collaboration and critical thinking.
Fun Content
Project-based ventures are highly engaging and fun and as a result are more effective at training 21st century skills. Work together to search for hidden treasure, write a song or solve an escape room!
Exceptional Teaching
Our conductors are all experienced online teachers because they are passionate about skill-based teaching. Most have advanced degrees and significant experience in their field.
Small Class Sizes
Most ventures are limited to 4-6 learners per conductor to emphasize interactivity and engagement.
Choose a venture to get started
Featured Ventures
Billionaire’s Invitation
A reclusive Billionaire is putting a team of kids together to help her find the ancient treasure of Oak Island. Can you help her find where it's buried? Learners will need to work as a team, outsmart pirates, decipher ancient scrolls and find where X marks the spot.
Skills trained: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration
Songwriter's Workshop
In Songwriter's Workshop, learners collaborate on the shared artistic goal of creating an original song. They will learn the key elements of songwriting, choose a genre, write the lyrics and music and produce the final recording. This fun and engaging venture is suitable for those with music knowledge and complete beginners alike.
Skills trained: Collaboration, Creativity
Think Outside the Box
This escape room-themed venture takes you behind the curtain. Learners will discover the different elements, tricks and strategies needed to beat escape rooms. Teams will work together to build their own room, then see if they can pass the ultimate challenge as a group!
Skills trained: Collaboration, Creativity
Creatures of Planet Earth
In this venture, learners will explore the strange and inventive ways that earth’s inhabitants have adapted to survive environments full of predators, prey and climate challenges. Throughout the sessions, learners will build and evaluate unique environments and ultimately create their own animal – which will be put to the test in a game of survival of the fittest!
Skills trained: Critical Thinking, Creativity
Our Focus: Training 21st Century Skills
Young people today need to develop skills that will be relevant in tomorrow’s world. Braintrain constructs experientially rich, fun and challenging educational activities for young learners, using best practices in structure and pedagogy and delivered by top notch conductors. Learners will develop and improve on a foundation of highly functional skills such as:
- Critical Thinking
- Collaboration
- Creativity
In braintrain ventures, conductors directly train these skills using problem-based learning (PBL) and gamification/game-based learning. Our ventures emphasize teamwork, healthy competition, thinking outside the box, questioning of biases/assumptions and supported failure.
Testimonials
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What are Ventures?
Braintrain offers unique, themed challenges for small groups of learners. Our focus is not on memorizing information or ‘chalk and talk’ sessions where teachers talk and students listen. We feel that learning tends to be more effective when students are in the position to work collaboratively, express their thoughts, discuss and challenge the ideas of others, and work together towards a group solution to a given problem. At braintrain, learners are simply given a problem that they must work through in a supported way, using ’21st century skills’ like creativity, collaboration and critical thinking.
What we call ‘ventures’ are highly crafted complex problems packaged in fun themes to maximize the engagement of learners.
Participating in braintrain ventures will improve a young person’s ability to:
- Evaluate, prioritize and analyze information
- Understand technology
- Think critically and creatively
- Apply logic to evaluate options and make decisions
- Collaborate with others in a variety of roles, and
- Solve complex problems
We feel that these skills must be trained directly, which few school curriculums do. Studies show that the best way to train these skills is to challenge learners at the correct level and pace. They should collaborate with others in a structured, facilitated way. They should be encouraged to take supported risks and be allowed to fail without consequence. Braintrain is this philosophy come to life.
Why focus on '21st Century Skills'?
We believe in training the skills that will be relevant throughout the lives of our learners in the rapidly changing world they are inheriting. That means developing competencies that are directly related to achieving success in the information age.
As a result of the unprecedented availability of data and processing power available to them, the education of kids today needs to look different then that of previous generations. The ability to work, create with and engage people online is creating a new set of rules and norms that are only now being written.
With the increasing popularity of online learning, the event of remote work, distance education and emergence of collaborative technology, there has never been a better opportunity to fulfill our goal of training young people around the world for success.
Above all, we hope that our focus on game-based learning and problem-based methods will not only help kids build their competence with 21st century skills but will also foster emotional intelligence, situational awareness and other life skills that they will be able to pass on when the time comes.