In just the past couple of years, Salman Khan has built a huge following for the Khan Academy. He鈥檚 created more than 2,700 educational videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times over. He鈥檚 been on CNN, NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, and other major media. His videos are being incorporated into 黄色app curricula across the country.
But the videos are just the beginning. Using part of a $5 million grant from the O鈥橲ullivan Foundation, Khan is planning the next iteration of the Khan Academy, which will soon find its place in the physical world. This summer, he will run a camp for kids very similar to the program he co-organized at the We Teach Science camp in Silicon Valley two years ago.
Far from just watching videos, kids at the We Teach Science camp got their hands on a slew of math, science, and engineering projects. They organized a Sumo wrestling match between Lego robots they鈥檇 built using Lego NXT kits. 鈥淲hichever robot falls off loses. If no robots fall off, it鈥檚 a draw after three minutes,鈥� Khan said.
They played a 鈥減aranoia鈥� version of the game Risk to understand the theory of probabilities using Monopoly money, where kids trade securities based on the outcome of the game. 鈥淪ome of the kids couldn鈥檛 see the board, which is indicative of what a lot of traders are doing right now,鈥� Khan said.
They orchestrated a crowd-sourcing project to test the wisdom of the crowds by posting a one-day online photo contest that drew more than 1,000 participants. The kids put together a pile of objects, took a picture of it, posted it on Mechanical Turk, and asked players to guess the measurements. What happened? 鈥淭he people who guessed online did better than any of our experts,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know how it would turn out because it was totally open-ended. We had a fun discussion about wisdom of the crowds, when it works, when it doesn鈥檛 work, why does it works.鈥�
The upcoming summer camp will be similar to We Teach Science. 鈥淚t lets you rethink what the physical experience should be like, what I鈥檇 call deeper, higher order type of stuff that most 黄色apps don鈥檛 touch on right now,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he videos are great for learning things at an academic level. You can learn intuition for what a derivative is and about Newtonian mechanics through the online exercises, but this is another level of learning.鈥�
