Homeschool and Project-based Learning

Inteview with Ripal Nathuji, Founder of STEMed Labs and NeoTek Labs

What was your own education like?

I think at least my early education was fairly typical in that I grew up in a small town in south Texas, attended the local public school - nothing particularly noteworthy either way about the school itself. I think, as all students hopefully have, there's some teachers that definitely helped to shape my journey along the way, particularly as I got into middle school and high school. Then I moved on to programs outside of the town that I grew up in actually to a program here in Texas called the Texas Academy of Math and Science which really then exposed me to students from across the state of Texas. It was the first time that I really got exposed to students who went to bigger schools especially in cities and then also a way to get exposed to what other universities people were looking at, beyond the state. It was definitely an eye-opening experience for me at that point.

How did you hear about this program and how did you end up at the summer camp?

No, sorry it's actually a two year program so you jump ship from your high school then attend after the sophomore year and it's residential so we would actually, they have a dorm for us at the University of North Texas so it’s one of those things where they have to convince parents to basically let their high school kids go off to effectively college after their sophomore year. It’s a program that I think, even now, it may still be around but we were the ninth class so we started late 80's, early 90's timeframe and it still isn't I would say particularly well know. I happened to hear of it really just serendipitously in one of the classes that I did when I was in middle school. It was basically a volunteer service class that we would go into and work with the special education kids and we were basically working for the teacher in those classrooms. It just so happens that the other teacher that I worked under in that class, her daughter had applied to the program, and as we were talking she just sort of randomly said, “Hey this is a program that you should probably look at when you get to high school” and I was like, “Yeah, okay.”

You know, as kids are in middle school sort of like, “That sounds great. That’s two years away” - that’s you know an infinity at that time, right? But that was where it got seeded in my mind and when I did get to that age I kind of followed up with it.

Yes and so after you completed those two years, what happened then and what career have you pursued?

In that program, one of their biggest selling points is that if you stay within state you were automatically transferred two years of credit. So if you go to a UT or an A&M I think at the time when I was there, it was fairly flexible in terms of bringing all your credits in. I would say at the time, especially my senior year, I was probably fairly sure, just between that and the economics of the situation, that I would head to a state school. It just so happened that, just because friends that I had at the time, were applying to other schools out of state - M.I.T., Caltech - you know those types of school you hear about and you're, "God, it’d be awesome to have the opportunity to go there" but you also know they’re very competitive. And so I ended up applying to those schools and was lucky enough to be accepted and ended up going to MIT. I had one of my roommates, actually suitemates from town, attend with me so it was nice. We both ended up there; it was funny because we were both from small towns in south Texas, neither one of us had heard of this program when we were freshman- sophomores, and it just so happened that not only did we both end up going, but that we both ended up going to MIT together at the same time.

I knew going in that I wanted to do engineering. At the time technology and computers were a big thing so I decided to pick computer science and EE as my major, mainly because just the way MIT is structured, you can choose computer science, EE, or there was an in-between that they called the 6-2 program. It forced me to not make a decision between the two so that’s what I did. I decided to pursue grad school from there, stayed within computer science, and then bounced into industry after grad school, joined Microsoft research and ended up growing my career from there.

Reflecting on your own educational experience coming from a small town in Texas, ending up at MIT and then pursuing even more education, what do you think the purpose of education is now?

If I had to put it into one, the goal should be as a system: to produce independent thinkers that are motivated and self-enabled to help build a better world. It sounds idealistic but at the same time, I think that should be the goal. As a parent I think definitely that’s what you want to see, right - your children being able to have a vision for how they can benefit the world and being able to inflict that change that they want to see. I think the teachers and educators to an extent would agree with that as well. I mean the devil is always in the details but I think that’s the purpose as an overall goal.

Sometimes I feel that we lose sight of the goal and that every day - getting through school, getting grades and then applying to certain schools, getting in or not getting in - somehow that gets lost.

I think nobody would disagree if you said the how of how would you achieve that general goal is helping students learn how to learn, and really within that, what you really try to do is help them continuously grow. That journey never ends and, I think fundamentally, what that requires from both, an educational standpoint and from a psychological standpoint, is there’s always this continuing tension between learning new skills or expanding your skills in a specific domain and finding ways to apply those skills that challenge you just enough to force you to grow.

You can’t put Shakespeare in front of a five-year-old - that’s too far removed - but if he's first able to learn how to sound out letters and then form words, then read early age books, and you’re always kind of stretching and expanding. Then I think we're very comfortable with what that means with very young children, right, learning basic arithmetic and reading and those fundamental skills. Where I think we tend to get lost, as both children grow, but then as the world changes is - what is the next things to learn and what is the right set of challenges? As a society, we have this tension between wanting definition and a way to measure it but then providing flexibility so that we can adapt to the changes around us. And that’s where all these artifacts that we talk about and we debate over in terms of what's going on with education, and what’s the right direction versus the implied wrong direction, I see that as being kind of the seed of where those divergences happen.

How do we help students figure out who they are and what is their place in the world? I think education does deliver the content knowledge, but as you're able to get more of that on the Internet or learn on your own, I think I see the increasing importance of schools being a place where students can figure out who they are and how to interact with others.

It’s interesting because I look back on that and even when I talk to adults today, there was never really a time where I think we were in a position to do that either in school or even as you enter your career field. At the same time at some point it’s implied that you have the answer to that, in terms of when you’re forced to make that career choice or the next job you’re going to take. It’s one of those things that we assumed that we've all come to terms with the answer to that question but we never created the space and the opportunity for that to happen. I do think it’s interesting that we are increasingly trying to place schools and education as the source of when that should happen but I do think that’s a shift in just thought both from parents and, I think increasingly society, and I see that as a good thing. But I think it’s one of those that there was never an answer to that, at least in my mind, and it's just now that we are able to - maybe whether you look at that as an opportunity or we’re at that point in maturity of what we expect of our education system - that we are starting to look at that question. I think the answer to that in the end is somewhat still open but I think where we are starting to see some early traction and early promise, is really around project-based learning right. But even then, what’s important there is having students work on projects that they find important. At the earliest stages, asking the students what is something that is interesting to you? and what would you want to work on related to that?  Because I think that muscle of finding out who you are requires other muscles - self-awareness and being able to self-reflect. That’s the feedback loop that needs to happen and I think those muscles psychologically aren't emphasized in school today and they need to be. I think that's something that requires creating both the environments for, but then providing the space for teachers to actually go and spend time on those types of activities because it is time intensive and it then becomes difficult to measure.

What do you think education is getting right at the moment?

That's an interesting question and I think, in some ways it’s an improperly positioned question. By answering what it's getting right, it implies that there's something that it’s inherently getting wrong. I'll maybe riff on that by saying if you look at education in a broad sense, you have to look at it in the context of what are those sets of problems it’s trying to solve? If you and I sat down and we’re trying to define the system de novo, we would currently have the list of problems that it’s trying to solve. It would span everything from giving students this kind of underlying content knowledge, the skills, the psychological points that we brought up about being able to build a definition of who they are, but then all the way down to providing a form of child care, it’s helping us solve the problem of food insecurity. And so as you start broadening the envelope of what the system is having to try and solve, it’s hard to really say that you wouldn't come up with a solution being what it looks like today, and to some extent I think it's doing a good job given what it's been asked to do. Like a lot of product exercises, the trick is in saying, what are the things that we can remove so we can have a more effective product for the set of problems that remain that we're wanting to solve? I honestly look at this and I spend time thinking about it - that if you look at that broad set of problems that our education system is having to try and solve, within the budgetary constraints that are placed on it, it’s really hard to argue that it’s way off base. I think the fundamental thing is - if you want to see a change we have to answer the hard questions around - do we want to put more more resources in it? do we want to remove some of the problems we’re asking it to solve? It’s a system design problem, I think, versus a - is the current solution wrong given the criteria that we're imposing on it?

That's a great point, yes when you brought up food insecurity you made me think of all the other things that school provides to students that they just would not have access to otherwise.

I think the toughest part is that the teacher is in the middle; they are being asked to do so many things and then you look at the recent news, and there are certain skills that we're saying teachers should have that I'm like "There’s no way". There's only so much you could ask from them. They're the ones that are working with the students and I don’t think anybody’s going to argue that we as a country and society give them even reasonable resources much less unlimited resources, but we ask so much. It’s one of those things that when you look at that equilibrium, sometimes I look at them and say - we should be happy that it’s not worse, given just the various dimensions of the problem.

Who have been the three greatest teachers or mentors that you’ve had in your career?

My greatest teachers are the ones that had the most impact on the overall trajectory of where my education went. A lot of that probably happened in that middle school-high school range. I think the commonalities of what they all did was they advocated on my behalf in some way that they definitely didn’t have to; it was above and beyond the call of duty. It was very much because it was something that they felt was right for me. An example of that, was I had a teacher in middle school who was my math teacher and he just decided that I was bored out of my mind and broached the conversation with my parents and I think he brought in the principal. I just remember he was being proactive about it and he basically said, “you need to not do 7th grade math, you should just go straight to doing algebra and forget this other stuff.” And they got into this bigger conversation on - is that right and all these other things, and he again was the advocate, because my parents were supportive, but they didn’t know what the inherent trade-offs were in even trying to make this decision. So the fact that he took the time to go in there and have these sessions and really even just say for me say "this is what the student needs because of XYZ" and kind of supporting the case and then making that happen - that was definitely a changing point because nuts and bolts,  I wasn’t bored in next year in math. But then, one of those subtle things that I learned was like oh wow, there’s always exceptions to rules. This structure that we always assume is there, is by no means rigid. Then like any good kid does I started playing with that and some teachers were supportive of it, some were not. But again as I evolved and went to high school, it was those teachers that I would say did, maybe push boundaries a little bit, but they would push back, as it made sense, but they allowed that growth to happen. One of my teachers that I had allowed us - as we were doing things like academic competitions, whereas a small school we didn’t really have the resources or budgets for buses to take us to these things - to self-organize. We were our own coaches, we had to figure out what it meant to prepare for these things and all of that, putting in the time to let us do it, but then you know carving out mornings and coming in early to open up the classroom or staying after and all of these things that was well outside of the standard day duties. But it allowed for that growth and that confidence that comes from going and doing things that you feel you want to work on even if that path doesn’t exist in front of you. I think that mindset being laid early on was significantly impactful throughout my life. Once you shift that mental model of, there’s a path in front of you, you just put the one foot in front of the other to, oh wow,  there’s actually no frame. You define what the system should be for yourself and then act upon that, it’s very empowering and at the same time you impose challenges on yourself but I think in those two cases it was those individual experiences and really them putting the extra time in and it was so impactful for me.

What are the two or three most important things that you teach your own children?

1. Learning how to fail well.  I know a common thing we hear is learning how to fail fast and that’s great in entrepreneurship and business. I think more broadly this notion of learning how to fail well, which is in my mind teaching my kids that you shouldn’t fear failure, don’t be so risk averse that you’re always taking on things that you know you can do. But also when failure happens, learn how to reflect back on it and learn from it, because that's again something that we don’t often do. When something goes wrong and then we just want to shove it away - it's that test that has an "F" on it, you shove it in the folder at the bottom, you’ll never want to look at it again. So it just goes hand-in-hand with that theme of learning how to fail well.

2. Ignore the noise that surrounds you and take the time to focus on being yourself. I think that that goes really well with the question you asked earlier about finding the time of how do you find out who you are. And when I say ignore the noise, I lump myself in the noise. I’m like going to tell you stuff and I'm going to give you advice and things like that but who’s to say that I’m right? That one I may not emphasize much, depending on what’s going on, but I think it's one of the lessons that I do want to pass on is - you have to, there so much around you saying that this is what you should do, or this is how you should think, or these are the things that define success, that you have to ignore that, and think about for yourself what's important.

3. Learn how to give and ask for help. The first is just in line with being someone who wants to give back and help others around you. I think that goes hand-in-hand with that fear of failure, where I think often times students feel like asking for help is a sign of weakness. To me, I think it’s a sign of strength because if you’re asking for help it usually means that you're self-reflective and self-aware enough to know what your weaknesses are, and you’re being strategic and able to identify, here's someone that could help me with this issue. I think as long as you’re looking at that from that lens, it’s a great thing and it’s a great asset. I think it’s one of those things that’s often underemphasized, at least in practice. We definitely get this "I shouldn't ask for help because it makes me look bad" type of mentality and I definitely don’t want my kids to have that.

What made you decide to homeschool your children rather than put them in a public or private school?

It wasn't something that when we had the kids we knew, out of the gate, we were going to homeschool. It came up organically when our daughter was getting to the point where we had to start looking at schools. We were just talking about it and looking at the options out there and it was one of those "well you know it’s kindergarten" and we’ve already been doing stuff at home early on. She was an avid reader already - she kind of taught herself how to read. It was one of those - well, maybe it wouldn’t be the biggest risk, just to see what happens if we homeschool for kindergarten. We decided that, as we started the process, let’s take it year to year and if we think we can handle it, we'll try the next year and if not then we’ll figure out what the next step is.

What are the biggest challenges of homeschooling your children?

I think the challenge is probably the same as it is in anything once you realize that there’s no inherent right answer. Everybody’s doing it for a different reason so everybody has their right answer. There’s no checklist of here's exactly what we should do to go implement this. And so what you end up having to do is come up with your own process for effectively running the school for your kids and everything that comes with it - how do you check the boxes on making sure that they’re having the opportunity to socialize with peers and just play? Especially at a young age, creative play is just a great way to learn and explore and become creative and take things that you’re learning and apply them in different ways. Then the other part in terms of identifying if you’re going to use curriculum, what should it be, especially as they get older and you’re looking at environments that they might need access to. That becomes a challenge of identifying them, but I think that a lot of this is the things that you’re probably doing regardless of whether you choose to homeschool per se. It's just that you now have more flexibility on that time. One of the biggest values that we see is having that flexibility to - if you want to spend you know three days hyper-focused on this specific activity, you can do that because you don’t have to shift from period A to period B. I think the challenge is definitely in applying the right definition for us, and that’s an ongoing thing because that changes based on their interest and where they are so you’re having to play principal, teacher, and all this other stuff.

Can you give an example of one thing that your children are working on now?

I think all kids love nature, and they will just grab critters and animals that they see. They’ve been catching lizards around the house so that lead to a bunch of learning everything there is to know about them over the past six months or so. Then there was trying to create the habitats and come up with sustainable ways to feed them. One of the projects they're working on now is actually creating their own little cricket farm that they can use to feed the lizards they catch, but then also turn that into a business where they sell those crickets to vendors and friends. They’re in the middle of figuring out how do you effectively breed crickets and that is interesting for everybody because I haven’t ever done this before.

So that’s an example of an interest that started years ago and then it just kind of evolves. They can sit there and tell you all kinds of wonderful trivia about these insects they catch and things like that - how they breed and the way that the males attract females and scare off other males and stuff - that the reason they’re learning it is that they care so much about it. Otherwise, if we had artificially said, “hey we’re going to learn everything that there is to know about these types of reptiles”, just as factual things for them to memorize, that would be fighting tooth and nail; it would be a lose-lose situation. That's one of the ideas that works end-to-end because they’re actually going out and talking to people. They went to a pet store and they pitched what they’re doing. The lady actually homeschooled her children when they were young, so she was incredibly supportive and said, “Yeah I’ll buy your crickets when you’re able to breed them”.

That's incredible. It makes me wonder how we can recreate these experiences in schools.

If we started de novo and we emphasized that it’s about bringing the right people and resources to bear within environments and just let the students and teachers run with it, I think you would see this organically. It's effectively what I think a lot of these homeschool families and communities are doing - they're sort of little incubators, except each sample set is the students within the household. And even then, there's effective communities and there are homeschool specific programs and stuff that they attend, so they’re working with each other. I think that that would naturally extrapolate up to schools at scale. Of course, there’s lots of other challenges you would have to deal with - infrastructure and logistics - but I think that you would see some of this if you remove some of the other problems that you’re trying to solve.

How did STEMed Labs come about and what projects you are working on within STEMed Labs?

STEMed Labs started four or five years ago when we had moved to Austin. It was kind of this confluence of different things happening in my life and also within the community we were in. When we lived in Seattle I'd been engaged with education in schools there and I wanted to re-engage in Austin, which is our new home. Then we were internally having these conversations about what are we doing with our own kids because they were getting to school-age. It was the merging of all of these things into one, in terms of going out there and seeing, “wow, I think there are these gaps, there are these experiences that I think would be valuable that I want my own kids to have access to.” And if I’m going through figuring out what that means well, why don’t we take it the next step forward and figure out what it means to make that accessible in as much as we have the capacity to do so. That’s the seed of why we started STEMed Labs. Now its evolved quite a bit, in terms of the programming, over the years, but it has really been that channel of taking some of what I’m seeing and what I've learned and trying to make these opportunities broadly accessible for students and families that see the value of it and want that for themselves.

What is your vision for STEMed Labs in the next 2 years?

We started a pilot a year and a half ago called Innovation Learning Pathways; it was a program that really captures the essence of having students define and work on projects that are important to them. Going back to the point of, how do you know who you are, well you should try and define a project that reflects what you care about and then go as deep into it as you can.

And then the program provides the mentorship and facilitation and all of that. This year we are rolling this out in a form that allows it to be accessible to students more broadly than just those around central Austin and so the goal of the next year, or 1-2 years, is to roll that out at least statewide, if not nationally and expand from there.

What were some of the projects that you were really surprised by or impressed by that students did in the pilot?

Surprise is always relative to the student, so we had a student who seemed very shy. He came in and had this idea for an app. There were certain ideas that he had for it and then as he kind of struggled with both - getting the right prototype down but then really going out and doing validation - he realized that it wasn’t working the way he intended. So then he totally scrapped the idea of an app and started going out and brokering deals. He was going out and the fact that he was reaching out to people in that way, was surprising for us as facilitators. We were impressed with the hustle that he put into it and that he completely went off in this direction of, “forget trying to code something, I'm just going to go and figure out how can I go make this business work”. He tried all kinds of channels: Craigslist, Reddit, and hustling friends at lunchtime in school. So that was one that was just interesting in terms of that dynamic of what you expect the student to do and just the direction that they go into.

We’ve seen some other projects that I’ve been impressed with what they’ve tried to take on. I think one of the most interesting things at that age is you don’t shoot yourself down too quickly in terms of saying, “oh that’s not possible, that’s too much, that's just too big of a problem for me to try and solve alone.” You see a problem like, “yeah, I can do something about this” - projects that start off with trying to solve food insecurity for example. We had a student who came in and she was passionate about this problem and then watched her widdle that down in terms of well, how are you going to solve it and in a way that’s important to you. It turns out that she found clothing design; she was just very passionate about it and so she came up with the idea of starting a clothing company that then uses proceeds to help fund food banks to help students that are impacted by food insecurity at home. Watching them piece these two things together - what do you think is important? what are problems that you are passionate about? And by the way what do you care about? And how are you going to bridge these two, whether it’s a research project or an idea for a company? It’s a lot of fun because every one of these is an adventure for the facilitators and the mentors and it's just impressive to watch them try and attack these problems with no fear and then grow through the realities of what that means. I think it keeps everybody excited and motivated.

That’s great. Every student should have an opportunity to work with adult mentors to guide them through these ideas. I work with kids - they're curious and they learn so much so fast. What I would like to see is for them to be able to devote time to something for an extended period and really test their ideas out and grow from the experience - to figure out what worked, what didn’t, what they want to try next. So it’s amazing that STEMed Labs is offering this opportunity to students and hopefully to more students across the state.

I think one of the most valuable things is creating the space where they feel they have permission to go do this and invest that time. One of the things that we see ourselves bringing value toward is creating that community of students that are going to put in that time. If you’re in an environment where everybody is just focusing on test prep and doing homework and getting great grades, well that’s the mental model that you live within. But if you’re all of a sudden exposed to peers that are out there working on these project that they're personally passionate about, and struggling through these problems of, “oh, how do I take that idea and make it tangible?”, well now, all of a sudden you feel like you have that permission to also be doing those types of things. So that’s what we’re hoping to create and we're excited to work with the community and expanding our students and our participants.

What are you working on for NeoTek Labs? How did it get started?

In a way, there are similarities except it’s targeted more towards the corporate domain. That one started after the last startup I was involved with. We moved here, joined the startup, had an incredible experience watching what that looks like. Prior to that I had really only been in big corporate environments, so had experience working at Microsoft, and at Intel, and working with folks at the HP Labs and IBM Labs. I had never really been in that - how do you start something from scratch and grow it and see whether it sticks or not, working with early adopter customers and all of that. After that startup I was at the point of thinking about, should I hop back into a job or should I try and do something? That’s when I decided to launch NeoTek Labs. What we try to do is work with companies that are early-stage startups all the way through larger companies. The goal is to be that vehicle that helps transition ideas from that early-stage to adoption. We are that trusted intermediary between when technologies are early-stage to early maturity and the adopters that want to consume them. Because there’s always inherent unknowns and risks when you’re on the other side of that fence - whether it’s is a new startup or whether it’s an early-stage technology and you’re like, how do I integrate this into a product or into my business? what does it mean? - and fill that gap in a neutral way. It's fun because we’re helping innovation get to market.

Where can people find you, to learn more about STEMed Labs or NeoTek Labs or about you?

You can find us at stemedlabs.org and neoteklabs.com and you can find me on LinkedIn.

Ripal Nathuji

STEMed Labs

NeoTek Labs

Music: www.bensound.com