Introducing LALTech Lab
a student-directed high school enterprise
Forward
LALTech Lab is a student-directed EdTech laboratory in the high school, Liceum Artes Liberales (LAL), Warsaw. Part of the core curriculum, students create a real company that produces educational content through applied research investigations into technology. Students are decision-making and profit-sharing partners. Our aim is to build and inspire a global network of student-directed labs who collectively shape the future of education while creating real-world impact.
Our Greatest Resource
I believe that students are this planet’s greatest untapped resource. I can’t help but be impressed by the volume and quality of the work that students produce over the course of a year. I also find it egregious that the great majority of this work dies in the dank obscurity of the dungeons of our hard drives. What message do we send our students when the results of their labours are the meaningless excretions of the process of learning? While I believe in the virtue of learning for learning’s sake, I also find motivation in feeling the potency and impact of my abilities. Perhaps, if we valued our student’s efforts more highly, we might discover that they are willing to invest more passionately into addressing real-world problems and creating change. I feel strongly that schools must harness the power of student energy and capabilities to contribute to solutions for our collective future.
We are learning by doing, and the excitement of an impending adventure is palpable.
Harnessing the Power of Students
I’ve spent a lot of time considering how I might ‘harness the power of student energy’ in a meaningful way. How might I create a programme that integrates into the standard systems of education while offering a meaningful experience for my students. About five years ago, during a season in my life which was rich in inspiration, I began to imagine solutions to the problems of institutionalised learning and standardised curricula. I was struck by the contrast between how life employs a strategy of biodiversity, while education is standardising humans. How might a system of education look if it nurtured the innate diversity within each human? The idea of ‘funnelling into career pathways’ has eclipsed our perspective; maths, natural sciences, social science, and humanities; we continue to operate within rigid boundaries amidst an epoch of synthesis. I imagined the opposite of a funnel - a sunflower - the scattering of diversity. As students progress in their education, they should unlock the innate passions and capabilities within themselves, and school should provide the tools, workshops, and expertise to facilitate individual expression. Their choices should become a self-authored composition of competencies, rather than a directed framework of narrowing choices.
In order to achieve such a vision, school curricula would need to become flexible, diversified, and modular. Rather than instilling students with the dreadful feeling that they are being swept down rapids, desperately paddling to stay afloat, where each decision sweeps them irreversibly towards a career pathway from which they cannot return; school could become a flowering of possibilities to be explored; the creation of vocations, instead of career entrapments. Rather than the soul-crushing monotony of standardised curricula, that persists for years, I imagined a marketplace of curricula-providers. First among them, students, offering short modules that could be practiced by other students; low-risk, incremental learning which provides concepts, tools, and engaging experiences.
The Birth of a Lab
Upon returning to Warsaw after helping to create a primary school in Costa Rica, I reunited with a dear friend, Marcin Szala, who had co-created a high school with inspired partners in a tower in the central business district: Liceum Artes Liberales (LAL). It was beautiful for me to watch Marcin grow his dream school from ideas on a napkin to a thriving educational community. I remember passing through security and taking the elevator to the school premises on the seventh floor; a 360 degrees view of the city extends from classroom windows and it feels so cool just to go to school! Marcin invited me to teach a course. I felt a surge of energy, and my heart jumped at the opportunity to become a part of his vision.
…the lab has been heavily inspired by Kirk & Spock’s helm, and the bridge design of the USS Enterprise.
The idea of a high school lab had been rattling around inside of me for a while. I loved teaching my Product Development course, which navigated students through three different types of labs: chemistry, fine arts, and digital composition. With the very recent emergence of AI, I had been thinking a lot about technology and its role in education. While some schools were attempting to ban the use of AI, I was sprinting in the other direction. I was building curricula around it while learning how to use it at the same time. I began experimenting with local installations on my laptop and clearly saw that AI is involved in the future of everything, especially education. I could see AI transforming EdTech in the most potent ways, providing a new generation of tools of creation to wield.
One final piece to the puzzle was that of entrepreneurship. I had always liked the word; a sort of analogue for ‘explorer’, it excites my mind with the infinite possibilities of the unknown. I enjoy learning about economies and currencies, start-ups and business titans, and I have the desire to sail into that ecosystem but want my students to sail the vessel.
Marcin showed me his plans to expand onto the sixth floor and to create a variety of laboratories. He was also excited by the idea of an EdTech/AI lab in LAL, offering me the freedom to create such a programme. All the pieces began clicking into place.
LALTech Lab
I decided to create a student-directed laboratory which is also a start-up; not a fantasy school project, but an actual legal entity1. I tried to imagine a structure that would work for such a programme. I had been rewatching the J.J. Abrams Star Trek trilogy and began to pay attention to the organisation of the crew; as a result, LALTech Lab has been heavily inspired by Kirk & Spock’s helm, and the bridge design of the USS Enterprise. There needed to be enough scope within the work of the lab to allow for a spectrum of student competencies. I started to sketch an outline:
Engineering
Publishing
AI
Web Design
‘Pit Boss’2
Strategy & Monetisation
Content Creation
The next challenge was to define the scope of the lab and its business activities. The mission would be to create a digital platform for distributing student-created educational content - ‘modular curricula’. In my classroom, I had just been running a module creating pitch decks, so I decided that LTL students could develop pitches for technology companies, asking if they could research their tech. Through applied research, students would develop an idea for a lesson around the tech’s functionality. Students would then take the lesson and the tech and trial it in a real classroom in the school, collecting data and feedback in the process. Students would refine the work based upon the feedback and then release it into the wild on the labs digital platform. The client would receive a summary report, social media posts, and copies of the created content.
I would provide the initial structure, and then have the students grow upon the scaffolding. In the process, students would learn professional skills across a range of competencies, develop collaboration and communication skills through engagement with the outside world, create deals, pitch in boardrooms, apply and create technologies, and be held accountable for their productivity. Students would lead students.
…schools must harness the power of student energy and capability to contribute to solutions for our collective future.
A.I.
LALTech Lab now runs two times a week for 90 minutes per session. Additionally, lab techs are literally learning on the job; hardly what one might call a competitive advantage in the cutthroat seas of enterprise. But our greatest advantage is that we are under no obligation to earn a single penny, and we can still be successful. Transforming the experience of education is our first priority, so our minimum viable product is students who are engaged and passionate about the process of learning…but we believe we can do better than that.
I decided to place AI at the centre of the lab; the ‘thirteenth lab tech’ will be a game changer for us (I have a limit of 12 students in my classrooms). It will allow us to move faster and to perform tasks for which we have no training. We are working to build our own local A.I. server, training it on our data. This will also allow us to manage our workflow more smoothly over changing cohorts, that happen like clockwork each school year. Students will use AI as a force-multiplier, embedding it into both our lab and the digital platform, and utilising it for meta data collection and analysis. On the educational side, AI will also empower my ability to track and assess student progress.
Down to Business
The ‘modular curricula’ that I had been using in The Dojo, my other programme, seemed like it could be a great product. It allowed my lessons to be flexible, concept-driven, and designed for maximum engagement. I had unknowingly been practicing the template for years. In LTL, students could create an archive of such modules, unbounded by disciplines or activities, and release it for the world to use. Revenue streams could include the sale of premium content, affiliate merchandise connected to that content, and products from other student-led initiatives.
GROW - ‘an engine for creation’
From this idea, GROW was born - a digital distribution platform for the published modules of students. GROW could distribute content and host a networked community of student-led labs around the world. The next challenge was, ‘How do we develop enough curricula for the platform to be meaningful?’.
A constellation of student-led labs
From the beginning, I had designed all aspects of the lab to be scalable; returning to the question, ‘How do I harness the power and competencies of student energy?’. I was not interested in a local project, I wanted to create global impact. This in-built scalability meant that the entire lab could quite easily be replicated. Beyond this, any new lab would be under no obligation to follow in the same research path as LALTech Lab. A lab in Dubai might investigate architecture and development. A lab in Norway might investigate climate change solutions. In China, there might be a kitchen laboratory, and in France - a cosmetics laboratory. In Vancouver, a First Nations lab could investigate their traditional heritage. Each laboratory could generate its own content, templated and distributed on the GROW platform.
Monetisation
One day I was walking around school and was struck by a though: ‘When the fiat currency of grades no longer holds value for students, a new form of currency is required.’. While the reward of money for effort seems reasonable to me (students or otherwise), my contemplation was not framed by money. I also thought about the currency of meaning, where a student’s capabilities and efforts are directed into impactful activities that bear fruit. Instead of student work dying in obscurity, it should contribute to something that lasts and grows. We live in a time when we are confronted by great challenges, and I believe that students should be employed as partners in a strategy to craft solutions. Even if we don’t make a single dollar, or change the world, the experience of trying is meaningful; lessons can always found in failure. This method of learning is still more fun and effective than sitting in an assembly-line classroom. But what if?! What if we can make this work? What if we can inspire a planet full of student-led labs, all creating the educational content of the future? What if we could spark a movement of student-empowerment; an army of students who change the world as a consequence of their schoolwork? What if we could collectively create a student-led company that was valued at a billion dollars, or more? How would we invest and distribute the profit?
The Deal
I spent a long time ruminating over an agreement that would be most fair and respectful for all partners. To do so, I drafted a framework for a partnership agreement where profits and decision-making authority would be split three ways: Schools, Ryan, and ‘Students’. The first thing that I did was to have two of my students discuss and receive advice on the details of the draft agreement with a third party company3 (I removed myself from that meeting to avoid possible bias), and then present their findings to the other lab techs. Ownership of the company would be split between myself and the school, to shelter students from legal risk while ensuring they benefit as partners. Any student/lab who contributes to content published on the GROW platform, in LTL or from a ‘third-party school’, profits fairly from the sale of that content. Liquid profits will be held in trust until students achieves the status of legal adulthood, after which time they may withdraw their earnings.
We still have a long way to go before we can formalise an agreement, and there remain many elements to figure out, but there is a principle of understanding in place that will operating until the company is formalised and earnings are realised. Students are also negotiating partners in the formation of this deal.
Assessment
As LALTech Lab programme is an elective component of the core curriculum, formal assessment is required. I decided to use portfolios as the primary vehicle for assessment (in all my courses). Four to five times a term, students submit a single portfolio page accounting for their work. Portfolio pages are marked out of ten points: effectiveness in the lab (5), and quality of submission (5). Students are instructed to design each page creatively, as a design work in itself, while also accounting for completed work. At the end of the year, each student will have produced a 15-20 page portfolio; proof of work that can be presented to a potential employer or used for university admissions.
Where are we at now?
The programme launched in Sept. 2024, and as we end the first term, the ride has been pretty smooth. I also love going to work! It took a while for the students to adjust to the idea that this isn’t just a play activity, and that the company only grows as quickly as they push it. The students have started to take ownership of their work, are generating great ideas, collaborating beautifully, managing their own work flows, and trouble-shooting obstacles. At this moment, we have been invited to pitch to representatives of Microsoft, Dell, and Lenovo, and have found friendship and support from Intel. While Microsoft products form the core of our software stack, we will be ‘brand agnostic’; building relationships with all who share our values and wish to support our mission. We will explore all tools made available to us and express our gratitude to our partners in meaningful ways.
We are also playing with the idea to launch LALTech Lab 2 (LTL2), an extension class that will take place once per week throughout the school year. Students are now designing the application process, communications, and preparing to interview and select candidates from high school across the city of Warsaw. This extension will provide a sandbox for asynchronous coordination of workflow across classrooms and lab techs, helping us to iron out the wrinkles in our organisation, while also scaling outwards to students across the city. This is our first step on our mission to scale.
We are at the beginning of a long journey, building a foundation and framework for our growth. We are growing through relationships and ‘slow productivity’ (thank you Cal Newport4), rather than competition. We are learning by doing and the excitement of our impending adventure is palpable.
I believe that students are this planet’s greatest untapped resource.
LALTech Lab LinkedIn
LALTech Lab Insta
Any exceptional law firms out there? I speak pro bono. ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ ;-)
You know the ‘boss’ at the end of a level in a video game that takes endless lives to get past?
I extend my warm gratitude for MOST Foundation in Warsaw, and Dr. Jan Kaczmarek for his sharing his time and extensive expertise with me and my students.
Shout out to Tim Ferriss for the care and skill he applies to his craft, and for the wisdom of Cal Newport’s call for focussed excellence.