Are boxes age dependent? 

The cool thing about working to stimulate the white matter, is that white matter isn't age dependent. Our boxes are not academic- what we challenge is much deeper than that. In our gifted research, our team had fun solving problems used as warmups in a Kindergarten aged gifted classroom (maybe faster than the kids, but not with less interest.) We do ask for the user's age in order to make small tweaks, but for the most part, the purpose of our boxes is to encourage failure, so the user's ability to complete a box successfully has little correlation to the value they receive from it. 

What if my child can't solve something? 

The Outliers Project's mission is to create comfortable failure for gifted children. The leading cause of burnout among gifted children is a lack of early challenge and failure, which can create poor executive functioning skills, poor time management skills, an academic ego, a fear of failure, disassociation with learning or an anxious learning style. If your child fails, the boxes are working. Unlike their school education, successful completion of every activity is not the goal, in fact it has nothing to do with how successful this education is. Keeping at it does. 

What's inside the boxes?  

Inside the boxes are all kinds of activities ranging from art to inventing to gardening to "classic" brain teasers. What everything has in common, however, is that it's ultimately a puzzle of some sort, that's strategically curated to target the white matter of a gifted brain. While many of our activities are completely developed by our team from scratch, often times, our puzzles are also not that different from the classics you might see at a Barnes & Noble. We just bring them together, the new and the classics, in a way that will target different learning pathways each month as approved by experts, essentially doing the research so you don't have to. 

Why this model? 

When brainstorming for The Outliers Project, our team began with initiatives ran through schools rather than privately, then explored apps, websites, and one-time buy products, before landing on our for sale, physical, subscription model. As schools more widely adapt online learning, children increasingly miss the hands on aspect of learning, especially gifted children, for whom the very act of learning through their hands can stimulate their white matter. Hands on learning it was. School initiatives were incremental, underfunded, and didn't have the scope for the type of radical education we wanted to create. We would work on our own. And, one-time-buy products missed the element of growth through education. The Outliers Project's main mission, more than even stimulating the gifted mind, is to build the skills in gifted children that the neurotypical-catered school system fails to instill. This can only be done through repetition and consistency, thus, our ongoing subscription. If at any point, the subscription is no longer the right fit for your family, we make it easy to cancel at any time.