The Brain Chase Challenge keeps kids engaged with summer learning

by ParentCo. May 26, 2015

cartoon picture of a treasure hunt

Brain Chase is a five-week summer online treasure hunt competition for kids ages 6-16. This summer's competition starts on June 22. Brain Chase partners with education programs online to provide math, reading, writing and foreign language support.

Certified teachers provide daily feedback on writing, and kids must meet certain daily goals in order to unlock clues, riddles and animated videos to solve their way to a real-life treasure worth $10,000. Kids also receive mail, such as letters from characters, seeds to plant with clues that grow on them or tools like a sundial. We interviewed Neylan McBaine, Chief Marketing Officer for Brain Chase. Parent Co: I’ve seen a lot of excitement building with parents online, as they sign their kids up for Brain Chase. What makes Brain Chase different from other summer online learning programs? Neylan: I think the big difference is that we have this motivational platform built in to the online work. Not only have we curated and partnered with the best online curriculum providers that the web has to offer currently, but we've created this really fun motivation for the kids to do the work that is usually lacking in summer workbooks, online classes or summer school. That motivation is just enough to keep the kids excited and let them feel like they're on a real summer long adventure, without it sort of overshadowing the rest of their summer fun. The kids get to follow along with our kid archeology team. They’re looking for lost treasure. Then we take the adventure offline as well, and the treasure is actually a real treasure hunt. So the kids feel like they're participating in something online, but they know that there's also something real buried in the earth that they potentially could be working towards. It's hard and riddled during the whole five weeks of the animated series, but it's solvable and someone's going to win $10,000 and this very cool golden mechanical trophy that looks like the ancient lost treasure found by Cortez.  It looks like the parents on your site have great things to say about the program. You also enrolled your children in the program last summer before you started working with Brain Chase. What was your family’s experience with the program? One of the things that worked best for my kids was simply becoming familiar with some of the resources. My kids don't do a lot of stuff online. They're not big gamers or anything like that, so they’re young enough that they sort of aren't already online for other purposes. My oldest was ten last year, so I had my ten-year-old and my eight-year-old do it last year. It was really cool to have them become familiar with Khan Academy and see them start navigating their way around it. My kids particularly liked the writing exercises. They felt like it was really neat to have a real teacher on the other end of it that was giving them feedback on their writing in a fun, but productive way. I think for me, the experience was really about having my kids become familiar with these really great, sort of super foods of the internet, like our curriculum providers are, and become comfortable and get to know their way around them. Absolutely! I'm an educator in a school with one-to-one technology, and our kids use Khan Academy. It's amazing, so I thought that was fantastic that you’re partnering with some stellar education companies like Khan Academy and Rosetta Stone. What languages are offered through Rosetta Stone when kids sign up with Brain Chase? They can actually choose from 30. Wow! The entire Rosetta Stone offering. That's a big addition for us this year. Our vision is to have a full curated library of these partners, so that parents don't have to go and study up on all the different offerings themselves, but they can drag and drop the options that they want their kids to take every summer. Next year maybe we'll add a coding module or something else that the parents can select from. The core is always probably going to be reading and math with other modules built. Maybe we'll have a science module. We've talked about wanting to do a physical education module where maybe they upload activities from a pedometer that we give them, or something like that. Then they have to do a certain amount of physical exercise each week. There's a huge range that we can do in being this platform for a library of curated partners. That's incredible. The program seems like it's really grown in three years. It's great that it allows for more personalized learning, and that's a growing movement in education right now. It’s also excellent for homeschooling. Do you see Brain Chase ever being offered during the school year or other school breaks? Definitely. In fact, we're looking for partners right now with which to create after school partnerships, so that we can create a program for any number of students in an after school setting very easily. We have content from our past year that we could be repurposed and sort of rewrite the clues. We're looking for partners to do that right now, so if you have any recommendations or if any of your readers know of actual programs, we’re looking! We do group rates and we can scale, so the per child cost of doing an actual program is actually very manageable for groups that are used to getting grants and funding for much more expensive programs.  I know that students are working with academic skills like math, reading and writing, but what kind of social skills do you think this program helps kids develop as they work through the competition? I think the academic work is entirely intended to be done by the child, but the riddles, watching the videos, deciphering the clues and learning together about where these clues might be pointing…that could potentially and is very likely to be a family activity. The winners from last year said it was really a family event for them. We heard that a lot last year, that the parents would get involved with their kids and help them understand riddles and clues. They would kind of work together. From all of the accounts last year, it was really a positive family activity that lasted the course of the five weeks. Not too heavy-handed, just fun. So parental support is definitely encouraged with the treasure hunt. The family collaboration was really powerful. That's amazing. I think what often happens is kids are learning at school, but when they come home parents don't always know the right questions to ask about their day, and they get the same vague answer – “School was good.” So I think that is what's great about this program. They’re learning at home, and they sometimes need to rely on their parents or siblings to help them with riddles or accessing different technologies. It probably gives some great talking points for families about learning and technology. Exactly. Is there anything else that you think is important for our readers to know about Brain Chase? One question we always get, is about the price. I think if people are comparing Brain Chase to an app that they can download from the Apple Store, it seems expensive. But if you're comparing it to five weeks of a summer school or five weeks of a camp, 85% of our parents from last year said that they would've paid the same price or more for Brain Chase. The value of it and everything that's included in the program is a little bit hard to communicate because there really is nothing out there like it. The value we're bringing is this curated library of content providers. We're providing the whole motivational platform. We're providing easy, all inclusive access to all of those partners. So you don't have to buy your own Rosetta Stone subscription. Then there's the whole offline components. There's the animations, the adventure tools that we send through the mail to help kids each week with the bonus challenges and deciphering the clues. And of course there's the treasure at the end. It's a complex program with a lot of motivating factors. Once they've tried it and understand the full scope of it, parents overwhelmingly feel like it's a really great value. I definitely think so. I can already see the value because it’s less than the cost of a week of summer camp, or even the cost of Rosetta Stone. I was impressed with the price actually. Oh cool. We’re very happy to hear that! Absolutely. I plan to sign my daughter up this summer!


ParentCo.

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