We design learning the way great systems are designed—intentionally.
New to Ascension Learning? → Start Here: Building Curious, Capable Learners
Ascension Learning is project-based and fundamentally collaborative. We provide students from all schools and curricula the chance to collaborate across disciplines. They gain the skills necessary to excel in today’s workforce. Studio topics motivate exploration and discovery while facilitating technical skill development through the master-apprentice dynamic.
Check out our blog to see what’s new:
Sensory STEM at Home: Building Thinkers Through Everyday Play
Discover how everyday activities like cooking, bath time, and building blanket forts build critical STEM skills. A parent’s guide to sensory-rich, screen-free early learning.
Nature’s A/B Test: What Six Caterpillars Taught Us About Engineering Resilience
Most people see a caterpillar and think about nature. Engineers see a system. 💡This way of thinking is central to what we call the Builder Development Framework, in which learners develop their understanding by interacting with real systems rather than simply receiving information. Related Reading: The Builder Development Framework A system with constraints, resource requirements,…
Bringing It Home: A Relatable Example
This small-scale pollinator project offers a tangible way to build students’ confidence and a sense of achievement. It integrates biology, ecology, and conservation by creating a multi-resource Bee Oasis. Students will use simple household materials to provide water, food, and shelter for pollinators, learning about their essential needs and their role in ecosystems. Objective Students…
Learning Tools: Next Generation Technical Skills
or Fusion360 for more advanced applications
enables rapid prototyping
Tinkercircuits
to safely model our electronics, facilitate student learning about electricity, and inform our build
arduino.cc
For more information on the technical skills and tools we teach, check out Learning Tools
Learning Strategies: Method & Process for Independent Problem Solvers
At the core of Ascension’s learning strategy is our take on design thinking
Engaging in design thinking as a scaffolding process develops creative problem-solving skills and improves complementary analytical ability by approaching each step with scientific rigor. We practice the process outlined below:
Ascension’s learning strategies address the social and physical learning environment
A complete, authentic education requires more than books and tools but the skills and experience to put them together. We use readily available tools to enable a wide range of scaffolding methods that can help bridge the gap in a more challenging environment, where answers are not immediately apparent. Our learning model trains students to expect problems and encourages them to experiment with multiple solution paths. The reality of the applied solution process is represented below:
The studio environment provides a space where we can exercise our learning strategies through student exploration while leveraging a wide accompaniment of industrial and commercial tools. With their coaches’ guidance, students engage in a trial-and-error process to solve novel problems that do not have clear defined solutions.
Students work in a team, engage the relevant audience directly, and solve real-world problems with demonstrated need. Networking tools facilitate small group discussions and project-based learning integrates the development of discipline-based knowledge and technical skills for more holistic education.
Ascension learning progresses through all types of learning
The figure below shows the progression through all learning taxonomies in various formats and functions. Ultimately our goal is that students become teachers through creative design that empathizes with a specific audience and withstands in-situ testing. The Ascension Learning Hierarchy illustrates the path from more conventional knowledge acquisition to a meta-cognitive process where students explore how they learn and design to teach others.
Here is an excellent 9-min audio intro to applying bloom’s taxonomy