How to make online courses fun for kids
“I want more lecture time!” - said no student ever.
After running a cohort-based entrepreneurship program for teens, I have learned that having a stacked curriculum of lectures and a world-class lineup of speakers are effective only in keeping the kids interested before the program starts.
Kids write their applications on how excited they are to do “whatever it takes” to start a business that solves climate change, ends poverty, or speaks up for minority rights.
But once accepted and enrolled, all they want to do is play games and be entertained. I know they’re secretly thinking “Why can’t the startup I signed up to build, build itself?”
A cohort-based course (CBC) isn’t just about the content of the program, but the way that it’s delivered. This is even more so important in an online program for kids where the only educational content they choose to consume on a daily basis are 20-second Tik Tok videos where an Edu-influencer teaches while dancing to MC Hammer.
Good luck competing with that.
Students don’t owe us their attention. So how do we keep kids engaged long enough for them to learn the content, build the skills, and then deliver a finished project that showcases the understanding of concepts - without needing to pull out dance moves?
BETA Camp has helped 230+ teens go from “I have no idea what to build” and “Is a business a website?” to a revenue-generating online business in 6 weeks. For every cohort, we took NPS scores and feedback on every part of the curriculum. Here are the top 5 things we learned about how to keep online learning fun.
1. Help them make friends
Having taken my fair share of CBCs, the community aspect of the program is one of the biggest draws. As adults, we go through CBCs self-motivated to network with the participants. We know that the community is full of self-selected, high-quality people eager to connect deeply with others and build relationships beyond the duration of the program. I have found friends, investors, and partners through these course communities.
But a 14-year-old has never had to make friends beyond the classmates or teammates they see every day. Most of their young friendships are formed from consistency and the convenience of interaction. They’re also used to having a finite number of people to choose from to be friends within a class of 25 others.
Trying to make friends in a program of hundreds and finding people you vibe within random break-out rooms can be overwhelming and definitely not consistent or convenient. But helping kids find their tribe and build relationships is so important for CBCs to get right.
Looking back at the summer program I did when I was 16, I don’t remember the content of any lecture. What I do remember is sneaking out of the dorms at night, learning a KPOP dance for the talent show, and laughing until I was wheezing at my friend’s doodle, a caricature of the guest speaker.
We constantly think - how can we replicate that real-world experience of a sleepover summer camp?
The first step is to give the kids a reason to put in the effort to make friends. At BETA Camp, kids build startups in teams. They get to choose their teams and we start emphasizing from the first onboarding email that the teams that vibe the most often perform the best. We show them this diagram which shows that the third most frequently cited reason for startup failure was because it was “not the right team.”
This encourages some students to start self-organizing events to meet each other and create Typeforms for everyone to make introductions.
To help them socialize, we host 3 different socials a week that kids can drop into. These socials are created by alumni and all have a different structure to cater to different kids. Some kids need an activity in order to have a reason to talk so we have a list of games, speed dating prompts, a murder mystery puzzle, and more. For the majority of kids, they don’t know what to do when thrown into a breakout room with strangers. The best way to engage students is to give them something to accomplish or work towards. Instead of a prompt being “Discuss X”, a prompt with an end goal to get to like “Talk about your experience with X and come up with next steps on how to improve the situation. Be prepared to share with the class” is more effective.
Lastly, tie socializing back to their goals! At the beginning of each week, we remind students of the goals they listed in the onboarding survey or applications. They want to try new things, open new horizons, be a better person, etc. Before each social, we remind all students to take every opportunity to live out these goals and that includes being the first to introduce yourself in a room! Just these small reminders on behavior before each activity has made a huge difference in engagement.
2. Build Trust
Relationships amongst peers are not the only important connections we build in CBCs. In adult CBCs, the instructor is a guide and the learning happens bi-directionally instead of one-way, meaning there’s an exchange of knowledge between the instructor and students. The learning becomes a dialogue instead of static.
Kids are used to classrooms where teachers have all the right answers. Learning happens with the teacher telling the student the right answer instead of asking them for their opinion. Helping kids find their voice and having the confidence to think for themselves and express their opinions requires trust.
We knew from the beginning that in order for the kids to care about learning and succeeding at BETA Camp, we had to show that we care about them succeeding. This means recognizing what they’re doing well, showing them that we are listening to their feedback, and building trust so that we can catch when someone is falling behind early.
We create opportunities to shout out students as positive reinforcement. We recognized that the community progressing together also served as a built-in social contract - we are more likely to work hard when we see everyone else working hard.
For example, every Monday, we ask the Camp Manager to shout out individual students that stood out to us, and every Friday we would also get the top-performing startup team of the week to present their learnings in front of the entire program. We took care to reward student behaviors of taking initiative, active participation, asking great questions, taking action to experiment, and being independent thinkers - things that we valued over results.
Feedback also wasn’t one way. After every session, we asked for NPS and feedback. The next day, we would summarize the key pieces of feedback both positive and negative to show students we are listening. We would always end by highlighting what we are responsible for and what students are responsible for in the program experience.
This helps students feel like we are a team and it’s on both the program organizers and students to make it awesome.
Finally, we try to build trust on multiple levels. Attendance was taken at every synchronous session and if a student didn’t show up, the Camp Manager or advisor responsible would reach out to check in.
Every cohort, we hire alumni that serve as peer mentors. Each alum is responsible for a list of new students to help them make the most out of the program and ensure they have a friend to talk to with check-ins each week.
Based on interactions in live sessions, alum check-ins, and anonymous startup team-based feedback surveys, we are able to catch if a student is falling behind and make sure support is provided to help them catch up.
3. Involve them in decision making
Kids feel accountable and trusted when they have a voice and control over their experience. They are also more engaged because they are part of the process.
In our program kickoff, we spend time creating a set of guidelines together. When kids are part of the creation process, they feel more responsibility to uphold these camp guidelines and commit to the goals that we all set together.
Once students form startup teams, we give them a template to set their own team contract, again, empowering them to set their own guidelines as a team so they feel more accountable to the commitment.
In our first cohort, we put the students in startup teams based on the interests stated in their application, their listed commitment hours, time zone, skillset, amongst a number of factors. The startup teams that didn’t do well or didn’t get along blamed the process instead of working through the challenges.
So for the next cohort, we provided students with the tools on how to find their startup teams. We told them to discuss commitment and interests, ran a workshop focused on MBTI to help kids recognize different learning styles, and hosted many pre-program socials. But ultimately, it was up to the kids to find teammates.
What ended up happening was even quiet students came out of their shell, proactively began reaching out to others, and self-organized socials and events.
Even in curriculum decisions where we cannot offer unlimited options, we involve the students by having them vote on a select number of possibilities. For example, we have students vote on which speaker they are most interested in hearing from (from 5 speakers) and what kind of topics should be used in the next workshop (out of 4 topics). Every little opportunity makes a big difference in their experience!
4. Deliver the right content, at the right time with the “why”
In high school, I had the opportunity to do a summer program on a university campus. Every day we had a lecture from a professor in a different field. We learned about the geology of the moon, the theory behind a programming language, and ocean cycles in the middle of the Atlantic. And every day, the whole camp paid zero attention. Sometimes we heard snoring.
When we are young, we haven’t experienced enough of the world to make connections on why a piece of information is valuable. When we don’t think it’s valuable or relevant, we tune out.
Now, before every lesson, workshop, exercise, or guest - we explain to the students why this lesson is important and how it’s relevant to them. At the end of the lesson, we talk about key takeaways and how they can use the information immediately.
Kids who understand the value of what they are doing or learning are able to focus on learning. Luckily, because BETA Camp is project-based, everything becomes relevant once the kids start building their startups!
Kids also sometimes miss the point. At BETA Camp, we used to get feedback about how a lecture, an interactive workshop, or a panel was boring. Kids would give a low NPS score to a live workshop on marketing funnels because they weren’t interested in the gaming company running the workshop.
Relevant content delivered, with examples that are not interesting kids, doesn’t perform as well. We try to bring in real-world examples that kids have knowledge about and are naturally interested in.
5. Increase the number of State Changes
We run the program with about 100 kids. Have you ever been in a Zoom room with 100 people? There are some people who look bored, some people who look excited, and a bunch of people with either their videos off or you can only see their forehead so you can’t tell what they’re thinking.
Wes Kao describes a state change to be “anything that punctuates an instructor’s monologue and offers a change in pace that causes students to perk up and snap back to attention.”
At BETA Camp, we do state changes not only within the live session but across the whole learning experience; changing platforms, delivery method, and who is doing the delivery. These different states supplement each other and repeat the lesson in different ways so that it sticks.
Let’s say we’re teaching about Minimal Viable Products.
Students will first watch on-demand lectures on “What is an MVP” and “Examples of MVPs” in the student portal before the live session. Student portal lectures are 2-20min long and can be watched at 2x the speed - which we encourage (State 1).
Students also have the option of cheat sheets to help them review the main points (State 2)
Discussion questions are suggested at the end of the lesson and if a student wants to participate, they can head to a channel in Discord (State 3).Live sessions are not used to convey knowledge but to practice what students have learned in the on-demand videos. All live sessions are divided into 10 minutes of instruction (State 4), 20 minutes of breakout room activities (State 5), and 10 minutes of presentation and feedback (State 6).
We alternate between workshops that are hosted by our Camp Manager and workshops hosted by guest speakers. (State 7)After learning and practicing skills, it’s time for students to apply what they learned on their project. Students arrange meeting times with their teams (State 8) and are encouraged to divide tasks and work independently (State 9). This week, they focus on building their MVP using no-code tools.
Every week, each team meets with an advisor to stay accountable and receive feedback on their startup progress. The advisor helps students understand where to apply the lessons learned (State 10).
Through this multi-touchpoint program, students experience 10 different state changes to break up the monotony for learning about one topic!
Kids are different from adults. Whether online or offline, teens need to feel a sense of belonging from peers, respect from adults, and ownership in the environment to stay motivated and engaged.
At BETA Camp, we’ve successfully modified the CBC for kids’ temperament and interests. I believe the future of K-12 education will continue this evolution and we’ll see more subjects delivered in-depth using this model.
If you are developing online programs for kids, I’d love to chat.