Fab Fridays 94: Decentralizing Education with Synthesis
Synthesis Fundraising Announcement
This was a very special week at Synthesis 🚀
I’m proud to announce that Balaji Srinivasan, entrepreneur and angel investor, and Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, are co-leading a $12 million investment in the company.
We are thrilled to accelerate our mission to build the future of childhood education.
What a journey it’s been over the past year and a half. It feels surreal to have transitioned from a traditional classroom to the edge of innovation in education.
Here’s the story of how it happened:
When I joined the founding team with Chrisman Frank and Josh Dahn, we had a big vision and a few brave kids embarking on our crazy experiment. Today, we have thousands of active students, and thousands more waiting to join.
We’ve grown 5x in 12 months!
Our goal is to create supercollaborators, people who can work together to solve complex problems to advance human civilization.
In case you missed it, here’s the story of how Synthesis came about:
Our students compete in teams to run movie studios, curate art collections, confront the challenges of efficiency while colonizing space, find the best networks, manage ocean ecosystems, and more.
Unlike traditional school, we put kids in front of hard problems and let them loose. And kids love it.
I still get chills when I hear our students describe their experience:
We recently launched Progression, a new model that lets kids tackle harder challenges at their own pace. In the past, kids learned in 1-hour weekly cohorts, but now we’re moving to a network. Kids can connect with friends and dive into tough problems whenever they want.
Additionally, we’re creating a student portal where kids can join a community of young problem solvers, go on quests, track their learning progress, and review their key decisions in the games.
Imagine a dashboard where kids can review their most impactful “aha” moments and reflect on what they learned…a space for meaningful reflection: one thing I always felt was missing in traditional classrooms.
We are also working on a new curriculum, where we help students learn the "meta game" — the concepts that apply across games and life. Imagine a world where kids learn the most important concepts from any subject by tackling engaging challenges with peers from around the globe.
We’re turning traditional education on its head.
In typical curricula, kids rarely get the chance to apply their new knowledge. At Synthesis, kids learn concepts in context and master new knowledge by using it to overcome challenges. Every new idea is immediately applicable.
If you’d like to learn more, follow our Complexity Scientist and head of curriculum Joe Norman.
Joe is looking for new team members who are quick studies, think with exceptional clarity, integrate theory and practice, love kids, and have a background in science or engineering.
If you’re looking for a different role, reach out to our CEO Chrisman Frank on Twitter. He’s also a great follow to learn about education because, like Josh, he puts his skin in the game. Here’s an example:
I plan to do something very similar with my kids 🤸🏽
The vision Josh incubated at SpaceX continues to push the boundaries on how I think about kids and learning. Now we’re making it available for kids all over the world.
This is only year 2! I can’t imagine what we’ll see when we hit years 5 and 10 (and 20 and so on…)
If you want to join the Synthesis team, here is our careers page. And if you want to enroll your kiddos (ages 6-14) sign up here.
Thanks for everything you’ve done to support this mission with us.
Until next week,
Ana Lorena Fabrega
