Let's build a South Florida STEAM center

When you think about school what comes to mind? A classroom? Neat rows of desks? A teacher with a white board.? Lectures and tests and trying to make the grade.

That’s what a lot of schools look like.  That’s certainly what our schools were like.  And it just didn’t work for co-founder, Uli Frallicciardi.  His brain wasn’t built for that …. It made him feel like a failure, so he checked out.  He turned to the things I knew – skating and surfing… action sports helped him find the confidence, and community that he couldn’t find in a traditional school.  

Years later when he was building skate ramps, he figured out that classrooms don’t all look the same. Making a ramp awesome was really important to him but calculating the trajectory and angles for a sick drop-in never felt like school.  When he experienced how math and science worked in the real world, those boring lessons came alive!  

And it turns out that way of learning… Learning by seeing and doing.. works best for 40% of students—nearly HALF.  What if we could help all those students realize that they can learn and that learning is awesome?  By creating hands-on, action pack learning, Surf Skate Science turns our local beach breaks and skate parks into classrooms where students become scientists in a real-life lab.

But we have an even bigger dream! We envision a STEAM center and maker lab were students can learn woodworking, 3D printing, podcasting, video editing, game design, sound engineering and even how to build skateboard ramps or design a surfboard or skateboard. A place were students can use their imagination and create.

Many students struggle to sit at a desk for 7-8 hours each day. Many students just don’t learn visually. Students start to believe they are not capable and lose hope. In fact, studies show that over 1/3 of high schoolers are completely disengaged in their learning process at traditional school. We need to do something different! Every kid should know their potential for greatness. 

Working at a skatepark for 15+ years, we saw kids who had the courage to drop in on a skate ramp but trembled when it came to education. We knew if we harnessed that same courage,  creativity, resiliency and grit it takes to skate that we could show these kids that there is a genius in all of us!

To make this a reality we have a plan:

1. Our first step is to create a mobile science lab so that we can take surf skate science to schools and to parks, to local skate parks, to local surf breaks, to share. 

2. The second thing we'd like to do is to create a youth maker and innovation center in South Florida that uses steam action sports, music, and art to teach not just kids, but adults as well. 

3. And we want to inspire other educators and kids around the world!  So, we are making our curriculum virtual and sharable so that we can teach this all over the United States, and and all around the world!

We've got awesome down to a science!