Home
AmCham Shanghai's Education Committee welcomes you to attend our next event on December 5th from 08:00 - 09:30 at the AmCham Shanghai Conference Center as we welcome AltSchool Founder Max Ventilla and hear his personal journey founding AltSchool and his vision for the future of technology in education.
Silicon Valley has long prided itself on solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. In that spirit, technology entrepreneur Max Ventilla decided to tackle education. A former Google executive who headed ‘personalization’ for the search giant, Ventilla said the light-bulb moment came when he started researching private schools in San Francisco for his preschool-age daughter.
AltSchool does away with the rigid curriculum and testing systems of traditional schools. It also does not use grade levels. Rather than dictate what first grade should look like and what a first grader should know, it crafts the experience around the interests of the students. Based on what the kids are curious about, AltSchool builds interdisciplinary lessons. Teachers craft individual lesson plans called “playlists" for each student. The lists involve about ten different goals and projects for the week.
AltSchool merges traditional education with the type of high-tech learning that you would expect from Silicon Valley, working on ways to change the way our children learn. AltSchool currently has seven lab schools and four partner schools and plans to be in 2,000 schools worldwide by 2025. They intend to launch their own R&D center in China next year and launch schools the following year.
Silicon Valley has long prided itself on solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. In that spirit, technology entrepreneur Max Ventilla decided to tackle education. A former Google executive who headed ‘personalization’ for the search giant, Ventilla said the light-bulb moment came when he started researching private schools in San Francisco for his preschool-age daughter.
AltSchool does away with the rigid curriculum and testing systems of traditional schools. It also does not use grade levels. Rather than dictate what first grade should look like and what a first grader should know, it crafts the experience around the interests of the students. Based on what the kids are curious about, AltSchool builds interdisciplinary lessons. Teachers craft individual lesson plans called “playlists" for each student. The lists involve about ten different goals and projects for the week.
AltSchool merges traditional education with the type of high-tech learning that you would expect from Silicon Valley, working on ways to change the way our children learn. AltSchool currently has seven lab schools and four partner schools and plans to be in 2,000 schools worldwide by 2025. They intend to launch their own R&D center in China next year and launch schools the following year.
