By: Since founding Digital Adventures and working with hundreds of kids on thousands of projects, we’ve discovered a fundamental truth; kids just want to play and build cool stuff they can show off to their friends and family.
Our educational approach is based on accidental (or incidental) learning, and is designed to facilitate a dual purpose – enabling kids to have fun while they are learning. Accidental or (Incidental) learning is a phrase coined by cognitive scientist and learning theorist Roger Schank and refers to the everyday learning that takes place in all of our lives. For example, an international traveler might need to figure out how to get from the airport to her hotel. Through the process of solving this transportation problem, she would also learn how the city’s subway system is structured and a few basic phrases in a new language. The traveler didn’t set out with an explicit goal to learn about the city’s subway system or a new language, that learning just happened accidentally along the way.
So we make sure students are having tons of fun working on engaging projects like building virtual reality words, designing autonomous vehicles or using 3D CAD software to model a new invention. Over the course of building multiple projects within several different disciplines, they’ll find out they’ve actually gotten pretty good at programming or 3D-modeling.
The best part about it is that the learning came within the context of building a cool project.
You can read more about our educational approach and philosophy here!