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happens when teams in innovation labs use lean startup tools without really understanding how they work. They take the canvases, sticky notes, whiteboards and bean bags, and they start thinking that they are all set for doing innovation. The teams then focus their attention on making cool products, without thinking about the business models that underlie those products.

Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.

The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.

The time is now to support the role of learning in the pursuit of discovery and to embrace the powerful agency of culture.

received
 funds to design and implement pop-up makerspaces during 
the 2015-16 school year. These makerspaces include the 3D 
Fabrication Lab, Upcycling Shop, Music and Beat-Making Studio, Robotics and Hacking Space, Digital
 Storytelling Workshop, and Clothing and Fashion
 Design Closet.

Each makerspace "pops up" in either a
 classroom, computer lab, commons area, or the cafeteria 
during the school's Smart Block, an open period for eating lunch, attending academic sessions, practicing sports and music -- and now for making things

Fifteen students joined the event to make, co-develop, plan, and become Maker Mentors.

“Design thinking is a collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving approach to social innovation, organizational change, and product development that has been used in design, engineering, and education industries,” he says.

But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.

heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.

This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.

Competencies, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the application of skills, knowledge and dispositions rather than content knowledge.

Competency-based models approach content as the backdrop, while putting essential skills and dispositions front and center. In this way, content serves as the context for practicing and demonstrating “transferable” competencies that can be applied in different contexts.

In competency-based models, the entire system must change. Students advance upon mastery  when they are ready, not when an arbitrary academic calendar suggests that they should be.