We bought into the company's credentials and vision of cultivating the student voice and critical thinking that Elon Musk would have endorsed at SpaceX- while using modern technology as a medium. Using both Synthesis Tutor and Teams over the past two months - the AI Math tutor has been amazing and the Teams' modern mission setup has been very engaging (besides the occasional session glitches, device and network requirements to join). The Teams sessions are supposed to be student-led, with parents taking a hands-off role and with changing anonymous mentors hopping in and out of sessions. Listening in from the room next door, every session is different: from children playing great in a team, to a dominant child taking over, to kids being confused by the prompt and rather talking about anything else on their minds. The play sessions cater much more to typically male interests while the discussion sessions are very female-dominated. That's why we made it a requirement for our younger son to also attend the discussions, even though many times it is hard for him to bring in his voice in the presence of more dominant communicators, or preferring to think and listen to other opinions rather than answering complex critical topics on a schedule. That was until today. We received an email from their so-called "Head of Coaching" with the subject line "Child's_Name Behavioral Issues at Synthesis" alerting us that our child had been "notably disruptive to teammates". As a parent, that is when you begin to care - what happened? Below that two screenshots of anonymous mentor notes starting with "Kicked Child's_Name" (fully inappropriate but apparently meaning they had removed our child from the session) and merely listing a handful of recent discussion sessions where our child started fidgeting, seemed tired or did not know what to say during a discussion session or had tried to make a personal connection with his team by showing a magic trick. Looking up this faceless educational team, it appears that while the program's vision, founders' backgrounds and tech stack are great, Synthesis ended up hiring the same under-qualified, woke, California-based liberal public-system educators ("coaches" / "mentors") that Elon Musk so much tried of avoid by starting his own private school - and that would never stand a chance getting hired (let alone leading a team) at one of his companies. In the end, Synthesis was a valuable educational experience: Carefully vet the people entrusted with your children - and if a company does a great job hiding their team and qualifications, they probably have a good reason for doing so. The vision sounds good, but execution is questionable. Low 1 star until replaced by AI
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Synthesis is a weekly enrichment program where kids learn how to create, build, shape, solve, invent, lead it.
We challenge young critical thinkers through weekly, real-world simulation games. Now enrolling ages 8 to 14.
Synthesis was a course born out of Elon Musk's SpaceX Ad Astra School that is now available to all.
