I’m writing here on an enchanting afternoon of Christmas day. Yes, we are a secular program, and, yes, we value all traditions of compassion and kindness. Thus, my offering to you for this holiday season and beyond can be found on my YouTube music channel. Scroll down to the Holiday playlist. You’ll find a 24 minute concert of clean family fun featuring catchy and meaningful Christmas songs written and performed by myself and my new sidekick “Hand”. In a holiday hurry? Singles of each song are also available. Happy Holidays!

https://www.youtube.com/@johnandrewbandYT

While I have your attention, just a brief update on our up and coming AI learning assistant. This assistant has undergone a number of name changes: “Ask the Author” has transformed into “Ask Alia”, which has since transformed into “Learn with Alia”. She is now fully trained in our physics and chemistry programs. Our next step is to embed Alia into our physics and chemistry CA programs. Then we’ll begin her training in our biology program too. It’s been quite the endeavor, but we are confident in the importance and value of this new and remarkable learning tool like none other. Alia is the virtual equivalent of having one of us authors by your side, and then some.

Oh, and I’ve finally taken to updating LearnScience.Academy. I hope you like the new look! You’ll find all the updated details for you to review to your hearts content. Again, for emphasis, this website is our homeschool support site. It’s here that you can learn about all that we have to offer. What we actually offer, however, is hosted on our platform found at ConceptualAcademy.com. And please know, you can always reach out to us at Support@ConceptualAcademy.com for any further clarification you might need.

Good Chemistry!

John

The post Winter 2025 Update! appeared first on Learn Science.

Our apologies for not updating this home school support site for some time. We have been overwhelmed with many adventures and responsibilities. Most notably, our programs are now fully certified by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) for use in public high schools. It was quite the task to get there. In the end, we were one of only six publishers who made it through the arduous and comprehensive state board review process. This included the multi-billion dollar publishers McGraw-Hill, Savvas, Stemscopes, HMH, Cengage, and little ‘ol us, Conceptual Academy! Wow!! Our great thanks to the many homeschoolers who over the years have 1) supported us, and 2) provided the valuable feedback to help bring our programs to a world-class level. Truly.

Suffice to say, over the past year we have been on the road (literally) throughout the great state of Texas visiting with just about every school district, science teacher, and administrator. It has been quite the honor. Of course, the big pubs are very well entrenched and with deep-pockets making it quite the challenge for us “new kids on the block”. That said, we did much better than we expected. . . which means we’re back on the road in Texas providing training sessions for all the districts who adopted us. Watch what you wish for. 🙂

On the road in Texas!

To say we learned a lot is quite the understatement. The folks we met in our many travels were stellar wonderful. How very encouraging it was to meet the many dedicated and talented admin and teachers. But while the people were by-and-large great, the system they work under is crazy. Absolutely crazy. (Perhaps homeschoolers know a thing or two about this). I’ve MUCH to report on our real-world experiences in all things K12 in an upcoming blog entry.

On another front, I’m proud to announce “Ask the Author” (ATA), which we anticipate being released in beta form this coming October. At that time, this stunning new feature will automatically appear within each Conceptual Academy program, beginning with Physics. Much more than your typical ChatBot, ATA is trained only on our conceptual content, which means it is not pulling from the tainted and at times inaccurate and biased internet. Rather, it pulls information only from us, so you can be sure of its accuracy and style. But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is that ATA is also trained in our pedagogy, which includes the Socratic method. If you ask for information, there’s a good chance it will ask you why and then provide that information in only little bits. Typically it’s the human that prompts the AI for information. We have flipped this model. We are training ATA to prompt the human for understanding. The ATA model is one whereby the author is by each student’s side and is constantly available for not just information but also for conversation. Soon it will literally be our actual author voices. How trippy is that?? Imagine your student working on a problem and getting lost. Imagine the author always available as a virtual study-buddy. We know that the best way to learn is to try to teach (get your mouth moving!). Similarly, the best way to teach is to listen (a good teacher knows when to shut up and just listen). Thus, we are training ATA to be a listener. . . so that your student can practice explaining that which they think they understand. That’s good chemistry AND pedagogy. We are most excited.Again, our apologies for the radio silence. I don’t think I’ve updated this site in over a year! But the good news is that we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make our programs the best they can be, which we know to be a life-long endeavor.

If you’re new to Conceptual Academy, thank you for taking the time to look through this website, which you should know is just a support site (yes, ATA will soon also be available for you here for conversing). But you should know that our actual programs are hosted on our learning platform at ConceptualAcademy.com.

While I have your attention: Some FAQs. Our programs run continuously, which means you can start and end whenever works best for your situation. Need to take two years for a one year program. Go for it! Want to start in January? Go for it. We only ask for a one-time enrollment fee for each student. Running a coop of 4 or more students taking the same program? Ask about our setting up an “instructor-led” program for you and your coop. Let me also underscore, as always, we provide a full refund if a program is not a good fit for your student as determine by you. To trial a program in action, consider our free sample chemistry course.  We trust you’ll find our programs to be rich, exciting, and meaningful. And today we have the approval of the super critical Texas SBOE to our credentials. Yes! our programs will qualify you for high school credit, and actually then some.

Good chemistry,

John Suchocki

Founder, CEO

16 July 2024

The post Fall 2024 Update! appeared first on Learn Science.

Thank you for the amazing support you all have offered. My deep apologies for the time it’s taken for me to update this blog. Of course, there was COVID. The silver lining to that rather dark cloud was that our programs became more needed and widely used than ever. It kept us quite busy.

To assure I get this post off in a timely manner, please allow me to focus on the broad brushstrokes. First of all, our partnerships with SEA, Rainbow Resources, and Homeschool Planet remain strong. We are most grateful for their continued support. And great thanks to the many homeschools who have been using our programs. Your support has made all the difference. This includes the development of Conceptual Algebra featuring Matt Foraker, an old friend and rather talented and experienced professor of mathematics from Western Kentucky University. From the start of filming at the tail end of COVID it’s taken us about two years to get to this point, which we call the pilot phase. There’s still many details to fill in, such as the video quizzes, but what we have posted now is truly a complete program. Thank you for signing up. Any feedback you are able to offer will be greatly appreciated.

The second major mention is our collaboration with a company called PocketLab with whom we’ve just been approved by the Texas SBOE for use by high schools across the state of Texas starting in Fall 2024. How might this impact our endeavors with homeschools? First, there’s the obvious thing that if we do well in Texas, then we would have the ultimate financial support to take our programs to the next level and then some. Keep in mind we are still a mom and pop curriculum company. That mom is my wife Tracy. I’m the pop. And our kids (now past college) are also heavily involved in this very family oriented company. It’s been an arduous task making it through the Texas hoops (TEKS/ELPS/TRR), which explains mostly why I’ve been slack in updating LearnScience.Academy. Thank you for your patience.

Second: I’m primarily a college professor. For the past year my head has been submerged in the K12 universe, which is 180 degree apart from the college space to which I’m accustomed. What I’ve learned is shocking. The teachers are stressed beyond belief as they are required to teach to the test, follow the standards (don’t get me going on that one), accommodate deep problems of income inequality among their students, and much more. Teaching the science is at best a secondary consideration. All for a salary that makes it hard to put food on the table. It’s no surprise that most science teachers quit within 4 to 5 years of starting in the classroom. The teachers and admin I have met are glowing individuals. They truly are. The problem is in the system that, in many cases, has turned into a race to the bottom. I understand homeschoolers homeschool for many different reasons, but from what I’ve seen, pulling one’s student OUT of that system is easy to understand. The sad part is that doing so exacerbates the problem. Yet doing so also serves to send an important message. However, is there anyone there to hear and then act upon that message?? The situation is worrisome with massive implications to the state of society.

But what if the local high school started using the same high quality science programs developed by and endorsed by the local homeschools? With our recent approval by the Texas SBOE, this is finally a real possibility. The eagle-eye feedback we’ve incorporated from homeschools over the past 10 years has truly brought the quality of our curriculum to the highest level. It put us in the position to be competing with multi-billion dollar publishers. Literally, visit and search for Texas high school science. We’re listed as “Myriad Sensors” which is the union of PocketLab/Conceptual Academy. Of a David and Goliath story, we are clearly the David. And in our sling has been your continual support.

My ask: Thank you for referring your local high school science teachers to the following web page: https://www.thepocketlab.com

Poke around and you’ll quickly find our Conceptual Academy resources as hosted on PocketLab’s Notebook Pro learning platform optimized for public high schools. (Our own Conceptual Academy platform is optimized for self-study and college courses). What you’ll also discover is where we’ll be heading with our homeschool self-study programs, which, as soon as we are able, will also be including many of the PocketLab resources, most notably their remarkable real-time sensors.

Funny story. I recently got an email from a homeschooler asking if we were still in business. He was remarking on how LearnScience.Academy had not been updated in several years! True enough. My apologies. But please know that behind the scenes things are rock ‘n rolling. For the next six months we’ll be roaming every corner of the state of Texas visiting school districts to let them know about what we offer. In a meeting last week I was blunt with a physics teacher from Waco. I told him that in using our program the standardized exam scores of his students may or may not go up. But what will go up is student attitude. He gave a sincere thumbs up telling me that this was exactly what he needed most.

That’s it for now. Check out our new algebra program! And send me a holler if you happen to live in Texas or anywhere on this precious planet.

Good chemistry

John

Support@ConceptualAcademy.com

The post Fall 2023 Updates! appeared first on Learn Science.

It’s been a wonderful and eventual year. Thank you for all your amazing support.

We just now finalized the updates to our 11 Conceptual Academy self-study courses. A lot of under the hood updates providing added stability to the platform as well as some ADA accessibility tools (tab navigation!). But perhaps the biggest update has to do with the many new video lessons we have recently posted: about 100 of them, mostly in the physics chapters.

Why is this significant? It’s been our long term goal to have a video lesson for every chapter section of every one of our conceptual textbook titles. To get there, we’ll need about 900 videos lessons. As of this writing, we stand at about 650. So, only 250 more to go!

Keep in mind, what we’re doing here is akin to building a pyramid. It’s not something that gets built in a day. Rather, it’s a life-long career endeavor for all of us co-authors. Our production rate is getting faster and it’s exciting to know we’re on target for getting to the top within a couple years. And when that happens, we’ll will finally have our Conceptual Biology course in place. Yahoo! Thank you for your patience. And thank you for helping to pay it forward along the way.

Aside from being populated with new content, the 2019-2020 Conceptual Academy grade book now also tracks student scores by unit. For the homeschool, this will help you in having more regular assessments. Please read your course teacher’s manual to learn more about working with the Conceptual Academy point system.

And thanks to an enthusiastic homeschooler for recently suggeting that we include flash cards as a student tool for practicing science vocabulary. We managed to build those for all of our chemistry courses. And they’re really fun. We hope to have them for Conceptual Physics next, followed by the other courses. Again, these things take time. 🙂

Just so you know, as of this writing, about 40 colleges across the country and beyond are now using Conceptual Academy for their introductory science courses. Plus, about 20 high schools too. Meanwhile, there are about 650 homeschools now onboard within this growing Conceptual Academy community. I thnk it’s fair to say that homeschools lead the way in may respects. Our great thanks and appreciation to you.

Except, I need to mention an interaction we had with one homeschool dad. He was so very mad at us. Why was he so mad at us? He was mad because of how difficult it was for him to find us. Then, the more he learned about us, the madder he got! In his words,

“When it comes to a real and substantial science courses for high school homeschools, there is a vast ocean of nothing. Please do what you can to become more visible. You are an island within that vast ocean. Hard to find. A few light houses pointing the way would be greatly appreciated.”

We’re trying, we really are. At issue is that we’re teachers and not marketing people. That said, we have made some important recent connections, and, yes, we just paid a hefty bill to a marketing firm for some serious help. But the truth is, these things take time. Our pyramid is getting taller and hopefully more visible. Thank you all for also helping to let others know exactly where we are.

Good chemistry,

John

The post 2019-2020 Conceptual Academy Updates! appeared first on Learn Science.

It’s been another wonderful and eventful year. Thank you for all your amazing support.

We just now finalized the updates to our 11 Conceptual Academy self-study courses. A lot of under the hood updates from our developer providing added stability to the platform as well as some important ADA accessibility tools. But perhaps the biggest update has to do with the many new video lessons we have recently posted: about 100 of them, mostly in the physics chapters.

Why is this significant? It’s been our long term goal to have a video lesson for every chapter section of every one of our conceptual textbook titles. To get there, we’ll need about 900 videos lessons, each of them integrating closely with and complementing (not replacing) the textbook paragraphs. As of this writing, we stand at about 650. So, only 250 more to go!

Keep in mind, what we’re doing here is akin to building a pyramid. It’s not something that gets built in a day. Rather, it’s a life-long career endeavor for each of us co-authors. Our production rate is getting faster and it’s exciting to know we’re on target for getting to the top within a couple years. And when that happens, we’ll will finally have our Conceptual Biology course in place. Yahoo! Thank you for your patience. And thank you for helping to pay it forward along the way.

Aside from being populated with new content, the 2019-2020 Conceptual Academy grade book now also tracks student scores by unit. For the homeschool, this will help you in having more regular assessments. Please read your course teacher’s manual to learn more about working with the Conceptual Academy point system. And that manual now also includes a log sheet to help you keep track of your student’s progress.

And thanks to an enthusiastic homeschooler for recently suggesting that we include flash cards as a student tool for practicing science vocabulary. We managed to build those for all of our chemistry courses. And they’re really fun. You can see them in our sample chemistry course. Navigate to the last video of a chapter, et. voila. We hope to have them for Conceptual Physics next, followed by the other courses. Again, these things take time. 🙂

And it would be negligent of me not to mention the new Conceptual Academy Big Picture Podcast series. A podcast for learning science?? Absolutely, and how! Again, chemistry is getting favored as our first series. This series follows the chapters of Conceptual Chemistry, but also explores chemistry in the community and has an early focus on the science of learning. The show notes are hosted at ConceptualScience.com/podcasts, which is our support site for college, high school, and co-op instructors.

Just so you know, as of this writing, about 40 colleges across the country and beyond are now using Conceptual Academy for their introductory science courses. Plus, about 20 high schools too. Meanwhile, there are about 650 homeschools now onboard within this growing Conceptual Academy community. I think it’s fair to say that homeschools lead the way in may respects. Our great thanks and appreciation to you.

Except, I need to mention an interaction we had with one homeschool dad. He was so very mad at us. Why was he so mad at us? He was mad because of how difficult it was for him to find us. Then, the more he learned about us, the madder he got! In his words:

“When it comes to real and substantial science courses for high school homeschools, there is a vast ocean of nothing. Please do what you can to become more visible. You are an island of treasure within that vast ocean. Hard to find. A few light houses pointing the way would be greatly appreciated.”

We’re trying, we really are. At issue is that we’re teachers and not marketing people. That said, we have made some important recent connections, and, yes, we just paid a hefty bill to a marketing firm for some serious help. But the truth is, these things take time. Our pyramid is getting taller and hopefully more visible. Thank you for also helping to let others know exactly where we are.

Good chemistry,

John

P.S. We find the quickest way to describe our work to people is to point them to our recently updated Conceptual Academy YouTube Channel where we post a small portion of our videos for the general public. And some how, our moon video is approaching a million views. 🙂

The post Summer 2019 Updates! appeared first on Learn Science.

I’m excited to announce we just finished updating all our courses for the 2017-2018 academic year. In addition to a new batch of video lessons for each course, this also includes more Practice Page worksheets, Next-Time Questions, as well as revised comments from us on each FYI page (From Your Instructor). For those of you who don’t know, an FYI page is where we offer our detailed study advice to the student for each lesson. You’ll also now find embedded PhET simulations within many of the FYI pages. These are a definite student favorite. . .and they’re a great learning tool too!

Notably, our integrated science courses are now fully developed, except for still being a bit shy on the biology video lesson. But we’re still working on that and have provided some key resources to make up for this.

But perhaps most significant are the lab activities we now have developed for each course. But wait, there’s more! Each of these lab activities can be accomplished using materials readily available in your household or at a discount store. Kudos extended to our colleague Stephanie Blake of Ozarks Tech College in Springfield, MO. She’s the one who led us and will continue to lead us on this charge. She’s been teaching physics online for many years. Her passion is developing meaningful and exciting labs that her students perform at home without having to pay an arm and a leg for a mail-order lab kit. Together we have adapted her labs to our self-study courses and they are all the better for it. Actually, much better 🙂

In that spirit, we also collated labs from our own lab manuals and embedded them within each of our courses. Which labs? The ones that are not only our favorite but that can be accomplished using household materials. So with this 2017-2018 update, we’ve got you covered when it comes to labs.

A few caveats: We included many of these labs within our chemistry courses. But for our chemistry courses, we still recommend the eScience Lab kits. For our Conceptual Physics course, you will be able to download all of Stephanie’s physics labs right from this website, LearnScience.Academy. Soon to be posted (as of this writing) her physics labs will be a free download. But I insisted to Stephanie that she provide homeschools the option of “paying it forward” with a requested contribution of $15 for each download.

On a side note: Stephanie is also a biologist! We’re looking forward to Stephanie’s biology video tutorials, which we’ll be posting as fast as she and her daughter (a multimedia producer) can crank them out over the next year and beyond. Thank you Stephanie!!

And from all of your feedback, I came to realize the importance of creating a users manual for each course. You’ll find this manual posted for each course here at LSA, as well as in the first FYI page within your Conceptual Academy course. Each manual, for example, will tell you exactly how the labs are set up for that course. The manual will also address any questions you might have about what a typical week might look like and how to grade your student’s work. We also dig into our teaching philosophies.

Concurrent to all this development with our homeschool self-study courses, we’re also making some great progress with colleges. Last year at this time we had about eight campuses on board. For this coming fall semester we have twenty!! Behind this remarkable growth is a growing recognition of the value of “active learning” at the college level. This is what Conceptual Academy does for the college instructor: Students can go home for their lectures (at CA) and come to class to study under the expert guidance of the course instructor. Gone are the days when all the instructor does in class is lecture, lecture, lecture.

Actually, that’s a bit of fantasy there. We find that many of college instructors, especially in science, are still holding to the 20^th century lecture-only model. Our mission is to change that. To show them what is possible. And to provide them the tools so they are empowered to actually move in this direction.

We understand that within a home school environment, your students have such key advantages. Yours are students who are ready to rock n roll truly helping to make this world a better place. But of course there are many students like this in public and private schools too. Imagine the heartbreak of such students heading to a college where they are piled together into a large auditorium merely to listen to knowledgeable professor pontificate. Never to take advantage of the fact that they could be working in class with their classmates under the direction of the instructor on problem-solving, hands-on activities, and articulating that which they think they understand. . .like the ultimate study session. This is what we support here at Conceptual Academy. We are excited to see such growth over the past year. But we know we still have a long ways to go.

By the time your student heads to the college of their choice, our hope of hopes is they’ll be able to find a campus where active learning in the classroom is the number one criterion placed upon the instructor for promotion or tenure. Our education system deserves no less.

I found myself teaching at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX, last fall semester, 2016. Those are my students in the above photo. Notice they’re not listening to me, but interacting with each other. 🙂 What an experience that was. I had some 300 students. Imagine active learning in a classroom of 300! It was intense work, but we had a blast and much was learned by all, myself included. I’m still getting emails of appreciation from those super friendly students of West Texas. Wow! As a traveling instructor, this coming fall semester (2017) I’ll be teaching a class of “only” 150 students at Weber State in Ogden, UT. I’m chomping at the bit to apply all the teaching techniques we developed down at TT for a class only half the size.

How is it that I teach at different campuses? These are campuses where our textbooks are used. It’s an honor to accept their invitations. What I learn from each campus helps us in crafting our curriculum. It’s also a prime opportunity to “show” a department what active learning can look like for their particular students, rather than just telling them about it. Really, it’s so much easier to simply lecture. Active learning can be a tough sell for a department, but once they see the results, there’s no looking back.

So let me end this blog the way I started it: with a big thank you. Thank you for all your support. Please let us know how your Conceptual Academy course is working for you. Your feedback is key to helping to keep our curriculum top notch, which is exactly what every student deserves.

Good chemistry

John

The post Summer 2017 Updates! appeared first on Learn Science.