Learning in Depth
Science is Weird

Learning in Depth

A year-long trek into the shiny center of reality. At the start, you get an individual topic that sounds BORING. We give you twice-weekly small prompts that are wacky, easy, and carefully designed to help you find what MATTERS to you in your topic. This is built on a radical new way to understand "understanding", and teaches advanced research skills. By the end, you'll have upended what you thought "understanding" meant.

Recommended Ages
We say “teenager”, but really mean 11 and up. Can a younger kid join? if you’re willing to work with them, it might be able to work. (There are a few pokes they might want to skip, and that’s okay.

11 and Up
Style
OnlineProject-BasedTeenInclusiveVideo-Based

How we teach everything

Not the same-ol’-same-ol’
We teach differently because we think about education differently.

There are certain forms of information that stick in the human brain:

stories
metaphors
riddles
huge, game-changing ideas

There are more — they’ve been chronicled by Kieran Egan.

These special forms of information are what we call “the lost tools of learning”. They trigger emotion. They make content matter.

They’re most of what fills up the mind of an educated person… but schools have mostly forgotten about these.

Everything we teach is grounded in these.

"In schools we represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. But the opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating.”
— Kieran Egan

We explode the “boring”
Have you noticed that a lot of the topics we teach — “water”, “soap”, “hills” — seem sorta boring?

That’s on purpose.

We love it when kids come to class assuming they already understand a topic… because we help them discover the truth is 180º opposite.

Because here’s the secret: we live in a universe that’s really weird. Stuff that looks boring almost never really is.

We help them see that underneath the ordinary lies the extraordinary.

We help kids understand hard things

These tools (combined with our tower-approach to approaching science) lets us teach ridiculously hard things to kids.

particle–wave duality
the true size of the Universe
the rules of the ‘em dash’
art history
the philosophy of René Descartes

…and so much more

Self-Direction
E means highly structured. A is basically unschooled, completely self-guided.
How much do students guide their own learning in this course?
A
B
C
D
E
Monthly Rate
$120.00 USD
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Learning in Depth
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Skills

What kids will learn
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Science
Science
STEM
STEM
Social Studies
Social Studies
Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking
Life Skills
Life Skills

Our mission

We've all seen programs that try to lean into a student's interests to spark the rich joy of learning... and we've all seen that too often, those backfire. This does the opposite: it gives students (parents included) an incredibly boring topic, then uses small challenges to bore through that boredom, and find how fascinating everything in the world actually is. The challenges offer wild freedom inside of careful guidance. They tie together feeling and thinking to create motivation that had lain dormant.

Our story

Kieran Egan, a recently-deceased educational philosopher, had a brilliant dream of a simple program that would teach kids how to fall in love with the world by focusing on one small part of it. Through my science teaching, I've gotten to run my life on this experience, and I've got to say, it's HEADY! I wanted it to be something that anyone around the world could experience.

Science is Weird Demo

Watch a demo lesson

FAQ: Additional Details about Learning in Depth

You and your kid clicking "update!" on your inbox, waiting to get the next poke — which might send you back in time, or to writing a poem, or to imagining something both absurd and real.

After getting a new tiny challenge on Monday or Wednesday, a student will spend 30–60 minutes deep in a type of research (some weeks books, or Wikipedia, or ChatGPT, or fine art, or eventually academic articles), creating something they're proud of.

Human beings! This is powered by “the lost tools of learning” — the original human toolkit. A few kinds of people, though, might find it especially up their alley…

The focus-challenged
Our pokes give specific (if sometimes bonkers) things to work on.

Autonomy-seekers
Each topic is a portal to the whole world. Inside it, you can steer your research in whatever direction you want.

Oversharers
We’ll help you share what you know in a way that grabs others’ brains — instead of pushing them away.

Anyone who has both very limited time AND a burning need to do all the challenges. (But either one is fine on its own.)

...Is everyone on our team 2e, or the parents of 2e kids? I think so, but I'll have to check that. I'm the ADHD homeschooling dad of one ASD 14-year-old, one ADHD 11-year-old, and a frighteningly feral 1-year-old. I've specialized in working with 2e students for more than a decade.

We have lots of science-geeky kids — but kids who thought science was boring love our classes, too!

We have lots of gifted/talented, ADHD, and ASD kids — but neurotypical kids love our classes, too!

Because we teach with the lost tools of learning, and investigate the weirdest, most complex ideas in the world… our classes can be for SO MANY KINDS of kids.

Basic reading and writing skills. (Beyond that, students can customize what they're reading and writing for themselves.)

Both Parents and Kids can participate independently or together. It's totally fine to sign up as one person and share the subscription with the whole family.

If you’ve thrown yourself into this (doing 3/4 of the pokes for a month) and it doesn’t work for you, we’ll give you your money back.

What counts as "works for me" ? We set a high bar. We promise that (1) your understanding of the world will be transformed, and (2) you’ll fall in love with your topic.

We highly recommend adding on a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT+ or Claude Pro, if you don’t already. This gives you unlimited access to the most advanced models. We strongly suspect you’ll want to keep it after the cohort ends.

Real learning is epic: full of confusions and exultations, dark nights of the soul and days when you bestride the world.

It’s more fun with other people.

Learning in Depth isn’t as much a course as a cohort — a bunch of travelers going on an adventure together. Some are middle schoolers, others are high schoolers, others are homeschooling parents. (A few teachers will be joining, too.)

To help, we have mentors who’ve gone through this before, and can shepherd you along.

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Meet Brandon

Brandon’s the founder of Science is WEIRD! But he’s taught a bunch of stuff. He was an elementary school teacher, he taught a semester of college, and led high school humanities seminars in such topics as moral economics, world religions, the philosophy of happiness, and the psychology of evil. His favorite YouTube channels are SciShow and Kurzgesagt. He’s lived in Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Seattle, and now resides in beautiful Rochester, Minnesota with his wife and two kids… where he wants to help build an adventure playground.

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Modulo's thoughts

Our learning specialists give their honest evaluation
ManishaCEO and Founder

Brandon is the rare teacher and entrepreneur who has the rare vision to step completely outside of the traditional schooling system in order to develop an absolutely brilliant way of enlightening young mind's and cultivating the future deep thinkers and shapers of tomorrow. And he brings incredible compassion and sensitivity to all this. This class is not to be missed.

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