RAFT Hands-On Education

By Courtney Hunter, Resource Specialist As Common Core is being integrated in every classroom amongst all grade levels, it is leaving some parents and children feeling baffled, perplexed, and many times, lost. With the new California Common Core methods students have yet to learn the techniques of looking at Math as a puzzle or unique contraption. Instead students are seeing it as a one-way path to unravel the one-way arithmetic explanation to resolve the only solution.   As we, educators, continue to build the minds of our students in our classroom, we embrace the complex problems with intriguing ways of solving them.   We lead our students to the understanding that Math can be messy and its okay to have a spider web of intercut pathways leading to a variety of correct answers.  For example, my fourth grade students were learning fractions. To many it was a number with lines keeping them separated. To others it was a circle with the same number of pie...

By Greg Brown, Director of Education Iniatives, RAFT Each year, the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) executive MBA program makes a visit to Silicon Valley to see innovative companies, including RAFT. Participants of the program are executives from around the world who are completing their MBAs through a Swiss university program. Organizers of the program feel that RAFT visits gives the executives an insight into the creativity and resourcefulness that makes Silicon Valley so special. The second 2015 IMD cohort visited RAFT last week. The participants came to Silicon Valley to experience not only the innovation in our region, but to observe how RAFT is included as an example of a Silicon Valley non-profit innovation organization that encourages hands-on learning. In just two hours, the visitors took a RAFT tour, made and experimented with Puff Rockets , and assembled over 100 Solar Cooker kits and 30 Kumihimo yarn assemblies. “I’ve been bringing m...