the art of problem solving course

Art of Problem Solving Academy Santa Clara

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About the Business

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AoPS Academy Santa Clara teaches small, challenging math and language arts classes in the evenings and on weekends to advanced learners from Santa Clara, Cupertino, San Jose, and the Silicon Valley Area. …

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777 Lawrence Expressway

Santa Clara, CA 95051

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Art of Problem Solving is the company that produces Beast Academy. It's excellent! While we haven't been to the in person location yet, my child has been "playing" her Beast Academy game online and it has helped so much to improve her math grade. We love it!

Mar 27, 2024

Thank you for the feedback, Stephanie! We're happy to hear Beast Academy has been such a positive experience for your child and has helped improve her math grade. Feel free to browse our course catalog to learn more about our in-person Summer Camps and Academic Year courses. We look forward to meeting you and your rising star! https://santaclara.aopsacademy.org/courses/catalog

Excellent curriculum, and this center is very well organized. Highly Recommend. For younger kids the in-person option is much preferred over the online.

Oct 25, 2022

Thank you so much for your feedback about AoPS Academy Santa Clara! We're so glad that you've had a positive experience while your student has been enrolled with us. We look forward to being a part of your student's future learning!

We signed up for the AoPS Summer academy at the recommendation of my child's school teacher. Hence, we had high expectations for the course and were OK with the high fees charged. There was no placement test for the Summer class. Unfortunately, the experience did not live up to expectations. The classroom ended up catering to a very broad range of learners, from ages 8 to 15. Some of the older boys were unkind to the younger children, who responded to constant taunts and pokes by disrupting the class flow. The teacher and TA were evidently aware of the situation but unable or unwilling to deal with it. My child ended up not enjoying the course, did not learn much, and felt distressed by what she described as bullying without consequences happening in the classroom. To their credit, once the administration was made aware of the situation (by parents), they took action - with only one day left in the course!

Hello Dan, we are sorry to hear that our summer course did not live up to your expectations, and that your student had a negative experience with us. AoPS Academy Santa Clara (as well as all of our other campuses) have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. It's important to us that AoPS Academy be a safe and respectful learning environment for all of our students. We regret that this particular situation did not get resolved sooner than it did, and that your student experienced distress from what was occurring. Since this was brought to our awareness, we have expanded our training and communications about bullying with all of our teachers and staff, and will continue to focus on creating a safe and supportive learning environment for all of our students. We wish you and your student the best.

I signed up for my son persuasive writing and geometry. The office is great very responsive and the website was easy to register and enroll. The classes are not too interactive or engaging enough for my son. Over the pandemic I signed up for a multitude of classes - this one did not work out for us. He was so disengaged and I am somewhat disappointed. The classes are expensive $750/3 hours for 10 days so I will explore other options.

Hi there! We're sorry that you had a negative experience at one of our AoPS Academy locations. While we recognize our courses don't always meet the needs of every student or learning style, we are continuously working to update our classes and make them more engaging and interactive. We appreciate your feedback and we wish you and your student well!

AOPS is a big brand for math enrichment, particularly for those who continue with math contests. They are well known for their books written by the founders. There are online classes taught nationwide, and academies that are on-campus classroom locations. This review is specific for Math on-campus, Santa Clara done via zoom due to pandemic, and in particular, working with the Campus Director of the Academy Sean Russom. A competitor to the on-campus model is the Russian School of Mathematics, known as RSM. Between the two, RSM has much better guidance and attention. They will call and talk to you on the phone, set up appointments to ask and answer questions! If you want to get started with math enrichment, it is better to go to RSM, they do a much thorough assessment, will schedule to meet with you and your child (zoom via pandemic). They actually want to know you, child, to determine pathways that will encourage the best path forward and explain their methods and processes. It was a shock to me that AOPS Academy did not do these things. Go to any enrichment, there is some sort of assessment done and an interview. It felt like there was an arrogance not evaluating and proposing the lowest common denominator. Their website speaks about getting a consultation. Although we signed up for midterm, there was no conversation over the phone, zoom meeting whatsoever. Looking back this was the first red flag. I signed up my three children and there were issues with placement. AOPS was suggested in our home study program. Prior, we have used RSM to much satisfaction. Long story short, we were looking for enrichment for my oldest and ended up doing a math contest. This is fine, but when it came down to doing the math contest hosted by AOPS, we were assigned to test for a higher-level math contest. In other words, my oldest son was preparing for a contest that he was not training for. In essence, it has been a waste of money. The second red flag was how quickly we signed up with minimal interaction, consultation, not even a phone call or meeting. The third red flag, is the Campus Director, Sean Russom. I believe a lot of this confusion could have been avoided if he did what other enrichment centers do. What other centers do is meet and speak with the parents and children about the program, identify gaps and suggest courses. But according to Mr. Russom, he could not because of the pandemic (apparently zoom was not an option, yet all classes were conducted on zoom). Furthermore, when I attempted to clarify our goals with my eldest, Mr. Russom would redirect and point to failings on my other children. Imagine trying to get clarity on one topic only to get a response that has nothing to do with your question. Another behavior over email is that he would answer respond assuming things that that was never asked or spoken of! I did not expect to speak to someone so scattered, especially in math when the subject itself is very much logical, sequential, and linear (until you get into college upper-division math, that is a different context). Given a choice, I would not want him to teach my children math, given the responses I've experienced. If you are looking for classroom enrichment, you will get better guidance and attention with RSM. AOPS books are good, perhaps try their online school (much cheaper, we have not tried), Or purchase textbooks, and self-study. These classroom enrichment programs are hundreds of dollars a year, it is quite an investment of time and money. Unfortunately, this was not worth it and did not live up to the higher standards I perceived by listening to their founder, Mr. Richard Rusczyk. Again, I am only speaking for this campus. If the Campus Director is behaving like this and leading this campus, it paves the path for others under him to follow suit. From my years and three children signing up for various enrichment and activities, it is really odd to have someone not listen to you or try to help.

Hi there! We're sorry that you've had a negative experience at one of our AoPS Academy locations, and that your experience did not meet your expected standards. We appreciate your feedback and the ability to continue to grow and change as a company, and I want to address some of your concerns here as well. The Covid-19 pandemic put our campuses in a challenging space, adjusting to providing online options for the first time ever and requiring a lot of change. We regret not being able to complete full in-person consultations at the time you were meeting with us, as we value getting to sit down with parents and students and learn about their goals and learning styles. We do still offer expedited admission options for parents who don't have the time for a meeting, but we offer to all parents and students the ability to sit down with us, take an assessment and evaluate the best fit for each student for our courses. We are also happy to answer questions through calls or emails, to make students' and parents' experiences as positive and smooth as possible. As our campuses have been growing, we have been working to evaluate the best options for contests that we host, to encourage learning and growth and further development of problem solving skills. Campuses are hosting multiple national contests this year, and we are additionally hosting our own AoPS Academy contest that students can compete in as long as they are enrolled with us. We are sorry to hear that the contests at the time your students were registered with us did not meet your expectations. The campus director you spoke about is no longer affiliated with the AoPS Academy Santa Clara campus, but we are sorry to hear about the negative interactions you had with them. We work hard to make sure our campuses are staffed with knowledgable, genuine, hardworking and caring directors and teachers, who work to create a positive space for learning and growth, and we will continue to do so as our campuses grow. Thank you for your kind words about our AoPS books, we appreciate your support for our company's work. Once again, we are sorry that you had negative experiences at our campus, and we wish you and your students all the best.

Great place! My children have attended the summer classes and have loved the math and language arts courses.

Thank you so much for your feedback about AoPS Academy Santa Clara! We're so glad that you've had a positive experience while your students have been enrolled with us, and that they have loved both our math and language arts curriculum. We look forward to being a part of your students' future learning!

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• Erasmus+ Resources

9.4 /10 on 26.000 verified reviews

Home Courses Creativity and Soft Skills Boosting Creative Thinking and Problem Solving

Boosting Creative Thinking and Problem Solving

One-Week course in: Amsterdam , Ghent , Prague , Rome

Description

Contemporary education increasingly focuses on teaching how to generate new ideas and critically address problems . Accordingly, creativity is quickly taking hold in the educational domain. Yet, it remains subject to serious misconceptions, which consider it as the stroke of genius of gifted individuals, or as an innate capacity.

The course will challenge these conceptions by illustrating many strategies to nurture, train, and ultimately improve creativity. By its end, participants will be convinced that creativity implies tinkering with tools, assessing the results, making tweaks, and ultimately visualizing the idea emerging from this endeavor.

Participants will practice many methods to generate new ideas across a variety of tasks and domains. By focusing on how creative thinking works rather than seeing it as an outcome, they will realize that creative thinking is a process that can be scaffolded by tools and external structures.

Course participants will learn to use some of the most famous tools in the field of innovation to boost creative thinking. They will discover different techniques to scaffold problem-solving, come up with new solutions, create stories and narratives, nurture imagination, and visualize non-existing realities.

Moreover, they will devolve time to experiment with these techniques in idea generation, storytelling, as well as concept art.

Participants will also learn how to lead their students to adopt these tools as an individual practice as well as a collective process during daily classroom interactions.

Hitting the new challenges raised by our society, not only the course will help participants embed creativity in the curriculum, but it will also nurture their students with a new way of thinking, addressing problems, and creating solutions.

Besides being at the core of rapidly growing disciplines – such as design, communication, technology development, and the arts – acquiring these abilities will also crucially scaffold students’ intellectual and personal development.

What is included

Unmatched Support : 18-hour daily chat assistance

Fully Fundable : tailored on Erasmus+ budgets

Flexibility Guaranteed : easy changes with minimal restrictions

360° experience : from coffee breaks to cultural visits

Post-Course Growth : 100€ online course voucher

Learning outcomes

The course will help the participants to:  

• Understand the characteristics of creative thinking;
• Learn to use creative tools across multiple situations and fields through activities and exercises;
• Nurture students in using creative thinking strategies for their personal and professional growth;
• Embed creativity into the students’ curriculum and classroom practices;
• Grasp the aspects shared by creative methodologies in different domains.

Tentative schedule

Day 1 – what is creative thinking.

• Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
• Icebreaker activities;
• Presentations of the participants’ schools;
• Setting out the participants’ needs and objectives;
• “That time I had a stroke of genius” vs. Reality;
• Tinkering with thinking;
• Course main goal: teaching students to think differently.

Day 2 – Problem-solving and idea-generation

• Brainstorming;
• Brainwriting;
• Mindmapping;
• Random words;
• How can these tools be used in teachers’ daily activities?

Day 3 – Storytelling

• The principles of storytelling;
• Fabula cards;

Day 4 – Concept Art

• Intro to concept art;
• Imagining the unseen;
• Epistemic drawings;
• Reference raiding;
• Visual libraries;
• Ideation through Iteration;
• Visual Tinkering;

Day 5 – Tinker thinking for education

• Comparing creative tools from different domains;
• Assessing differences and commonalities;
• Assessing how to exploit them in the participant educational systems.

Day 6 – Course closure & cultural activities

• Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
• Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
• Excursion and other external cultural activities.

Confirmed sessions

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Dates and locations

= confirmed date

• 22-27 Apr 2024
• 27 May - 1 Jun 2024
• 24-29 Jun 2024
• 22-27 Jul 2024
• 26-31 Aug 2024
• 23-28 Sep 2024
• 28 Oct - 2 Nov 2024
• 25-30 Nov 2024
• 27 Jan - 1 Feb 2025
• 24 Feb - 1 Mar 2025
• 24-29 Mar 2025

Discover all courses and activities in Amsterdam

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Cultural Activities

A walking tour One excursion on Saturday

• 8-13 Apr 2024
• 29 Apr - 4 May 2024
• 13-18 May 2024
• 10-15 Jun 2024
• 8-13 Jul 2024
• 29 Jul - 3 Aug 2024
• 12-17 Aug 2024
• 9-14 Sep 2024
• 30 Sep - 5 Oct 2024
• 14-19 Oct 2024
• 11-16 Nov 2024
• 9-14 Dec 2024

Discover all courses and activities in Ghent

Ghent, Belgium

Ghent’s 48h city card

• 15-20 Apr 2024
• 20-25 May 2024
• 17-22 Jun 2024
• 15-20 Jul 2024
• 19-24 Aug 2024
• 16-21 Sep 2024
• 21-26 Oct 2024
• 18-23 Nov 2024
• 16-21 Dec 2024
• 20-25 Jan 2025
• 17-22 Feb 2025
• 17-22 Mar 2025

Discover all courses and activities in Prague

Prague, Czech Republic

One walking tour One half-day excursion

• 6-11 May 2024
• 3-8 Jun 2024
• 1-6 Jul 2024
• 5-10 Aug 2024
• 2-7 Sep 2024
• 7-12 Oct 2024
• 4-9 Nov 2024
• 2-7 Dec 2024
• 6-11 Jan 2025
• 3-8 Feb 2025
• 3-8 Mar 2025
• 7-12 Apr 2025

Discover all courses and activities in Rome

Rome, Italy

A Rome 48-hour pass

Create a two-week course

+340€* per person *+440€ in Dublin, Helsinki and Amsterdam

Combine a confirmed date of this course with a confirmed date of another course and easly create a two week course by yourself. Start selecting one confirmed date of this course and see which other courses are confirmed in the same Academy the previous week and the following week.

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