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:
Why Intervention Isn’t Enough: Designing Schools for Capacity
Many schools face a design problem rather than a student problem, as evidenced by rising anxiety and persistent achievement gaps despite interventions. Systematic misalignment impacts learner outcomes, emphasizing the need for environments that support individual variability, resilience, and cognitive engagement. Effective redesign can reduce the reliance on interventions.
What Actually Makes a Preschool High-Quality?
High-quality preschool education relies on intentional design rather than superficial aesthetics. Emotional safety, play-based learning, structured daily rhythms, and thoughtful environments are essential for children’s development. True school readiness encompasses skills like executive function and emotional regulation, highlighting that preschool is about foundational growth, not early academics.
Bug Machines: Where Play Evolves into Engineering
At its core, the Bug Machines studio was designed to answer a single, provocative question: What happens when learners are given real tools, real constraints, and permission to build? Rather than a one-off project, Bug Machines represents a living laboratory where design thinking, CAD, electronics, and coding converge. It is one of the clearest demonstrations…
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