Greek explorer Archimedes (mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer) famously said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." The question is where does one place that fulcrum for maximum leverage? We believe that of all the levers one can pull, none has greater impact than the education of our youth and that fulcrum must be placed in classrooms, both virtual and real.

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In recent decades, many education analysts have looked at the needs of the workforce to determine how education in classrooms might be changed to produce a better prepared workforce. Analyzing employment trends, it's evident the USA needs more people to fill skilled labor jobs and, with the approaching "silver tsunami" of baby boomer retirements on the near horizon, it makes sense to focus on greater recruitment at college campuses for  STEAM-literate graduates. However, we believe this is too late in the cycle.

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Passions start young. As parents and grandparents know, children even as young as four or five are consumed by passion for topics like astronomy, dinosaurs, reptiles, and bugs (to name just a few) and obsessed with careers like astronauts, paleontologists, and oceanographers (again, to name just a few). As stated elsewhere on our site, humans are born natural explorers. The problem is between the ages of 5 and 18, children neglect, ignore, or abandon those passions to pursue more conventional paths, missing the possibility of a career connected to and driven by their early obsessions.

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Explorer At Large seeks to spark and nurture the flames of those early passions and keep them burning brightly throughout the K-12 window and beyond. Asking students in college to fall in love with STEAM topics and career paths is too late. To create more STEAM-literate, workforce-prepared candidates in college, we must engage, inspire, and educate children 5-13 years old, so that by the time they reach 8th grade, their passions are burning too brightly to fade away.  

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By creating explorers as young as 5 years old, Explorer At Large solves the problem "upstream," where it can have the greatest impact "downstream." To solve for the problems in the workforce of the future, the fulcrum must be placed in schools with a lever long enough to reach across the PreK-12 spectrum from beginning to end. This is how, over time, Explorer At Large creates maximum leverage and impact.