Your kid doesn't need another coding class. They need someone to take their wildest idea seriously — and the tools to build it into something the world actually needs.

Your kid is bright. They make things — robotics, a STEM elective, endless projects spread across the kitchen table. And somewhere under the pride, there's a quieter feeling: that all of it is practice for something that never quite arrives. Work that earns a grade and goes in a drawer. Skills rehearsed for a test instead of aimed at anything real.

That feeling is correct. The gap was never your kid's ability. It's that almost nobody teaches a young person to find the idea worth their talent — and then build it for real.

For most of history, building something real meant years of gatekept skill: how to code, how to draft, how to fabricate. That barrier is dissolving. A young person with the right judgment can now build things that used to take a team and a decade.

So the constraint isn't skill anymore. It's imagination, and the confidence to point it at something that matters. Your kid has more to offer than the system has ever asked of them. I teach them to use the most powerful tool ever handed to a fifteen-year-old without handing their own judgment over to it — to build real things, and to become the kind of person who builds.

If you're also thinking about what comes after high school: selective design and engineering programs are not looking for more test scores. They're looking for evidence that a young person can see a problem and build a real answer. That is exactly what this produces.

I built and ran the academic program at NuVu, a studio school in Cambridge. Every graduating class reached 100% college acceptance — students went on to MIT, RISD, Brown, Harvard, and roughly sixty more institutions, all listed publicly. The portfolio of real work is what opened those doors.

I'm an architect with an M.Arch from MIT and a Fulbright. I co-founded and designed a school. I ran the studios at NuVu for eight years and designed about two hundred and fifty of them. I've shown art at MASS MoCA, published photography internationally, built furniture as a carpenter, and built software that runs every day at Harvard.

Your kid doesn't get a teaching assistant working from a kit. They get someone who has spent his whole life making real things across half a dozen fields, and who knows how to teach a young person to do the same.