Hogwarts for Hackers: Inside the Science and Tech School of Tomorrow
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- Evan Derse, a junior at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, holds the wind turbine he designed during the freeform educational time built into the school's weekly schedule.
- Students (L-R) Sachi Singh, Shelly Teng, and Xindi Chen inside a chemistry lab at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, or IMSA for short.
- IMSA teacher Namrata Pandya (center) working with students in her Object-Oriented Programming class.
- Trophies and award plaques from mathematics competitions line the hallways in the IMSA math wing.
- IMSA president, Dr. Max McGee.
- Sanjay Kottapalli, an IMSA sophomore, practices violin after class. Although IMSA is a math and science school, it offers a host of other classes, extracurricular activities, including arts, music, and intramural sports.
- Inside the IMSA robotics lab.
- Harish Logaraj, an IMSA sophomore, in his dorm after a day of class. All IMSA students live on campus, and room and board is paid by the state of Illinois.
Evan Derse, a junior at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, holds the wind turbine he designed during the freeform educational time built into the school's weekly schedule.
Students (L-R) Sachi Singh, Shelly Teng, and Xindi Chen inside a chemistry lab at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, or IMSA for short.
IMSA teacher Namrata Pandya (center) working with students in her Object-Oriented Programming class.
Trophies and award plaques from mathematics competitions line the hallways in the IMSA math wing.
IMSA president, Dr. Max McGee.
Sanjay Kottapalli, an IMSA sophomore, practices violin after class. Although IMSA is a math and science school, it offers a host of other classes, extracurricular activities, including arts, music, and intramural sports.
Inside the IMSA robotics lab.
Harish Logaraj, an IMSA sophomore, in his dorm after a day of class. All IMSA students live on campus, and room and board is paid by the state of Illinois.
AURORA, ILLINOIS — As a teenager in the early 90s, Peter Chu was obsessed with an online game called DikuMUD. He spent countless hours playing this Dungeons-and-Dragons-like computer creation, but playing wasn’t enough. He wanted to understand how the game worked and, more importantly, change the things he didn’t like about it. As luck would have it, DikuMUD was open source software, so he was free to download the code that underpinned the game and start hacking it — and that’s what he did.
The program was written in C — a language he didn’t know — and he didn’t really have much experience with any kind of programming. But he was in an environment where he had the time and resources to teach himself. He was a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, IMSA for short, a public live-in high school with a unique approach to education. Every Wednesday at IMSA, students are free to work on whatever they want — to follow their particular passions through self-directed study, internships, or other projects. Chu used his Wednesdays to hack DikuMUD.
“I had to learn what the programming language was, learn what a compiler was,” he remembers. “I found books on it and talked to upperclassmen. But basically had to learn it on my own.”
The IMSA Wednesdays are like Google’s “20 percent time” — only better. “At Google, 20 percent time is actually tacked on to the rest of your job. ” says Daniel Kador, another former IMSA student. “At IMSA, it really is built into your schedule.” And though Kador and other students admit that they spent more than a few Wednesdays just goofing off — as high school students so often do — they say the environment at IMSA ends up pushing many of them towards truly creative work. And it pays off.
After teaching himself to program at IMSA, Chu went on to the University of Illinois, where he worked on NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, following in the footsteps of fellow IMSA alums Robert and Michael McCool. And, eventually, he joined several other IMSA graduates as an early employee at PayPal, where he still works today.
Chu is just one of many tech success stories that have sprung from IMSA over the years (see sidebar, page two). Other IMSA alums have gone on to discover new solar systems, teach neurosurgery, and found such notable tech outfits as YouTube, Yelp, SparkNotes, and OK Cupid. And the spirit that moved Chu to teach himself programming is still very much alive and well. You can think of IMSA as a Hogwarts for Hackers.
IMSA sits on the outskirts of Chicago, in suburb called Aurora, Illinois. It feels more like a college than a high school (see images above). At the state-funded boarding school, the halls aren’t lined with lockers. Instead, you find chairs and couches, where students will plop down to type on their laptops — or catch an afternoon nap.
One of these students is junior Evan Derse. IMSA doesn’t require uniforms, but he’s dressed in a shirt and tie, hovering over his laptop, which rests on a coffee table beside magazines with names like Pharmaceutical Manufacturing — hardly the fare you’d expect in the halls of a high school. Derse is testing a wind turbine that he co-designed with students at IMSA’s sister school in China. While his laptop runs simulations, he shows us the prototype he built with one of the school’s 3D printers. Each blade has a slight flare on the tip, which he believes will reduce both noise and friction.
He says he got the idea while watching a documentary on stealth helicopters. In order to build a prototype he taught himself to use Autodesk’s computational fluid design software. Shades of Peter Chu and DikuMUD.
When the school’s principal, Dr. Eric McLaren, revealed he was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, Derse and other members of the school’s robotics team built a robotic arm that McLaren can control with his foot and a Microsoft Kinect device. Another group of students is now preparing to publish a paper on silicene, a nano-material discovered in 2010, after developing new research in tandem with a group of students in Singapore. Still others are spending their Wednesdays doing cancer research, studying the mathematics of string theory, experimenting with nanotechnology, and, yes, building startups.
U.S. students consistently rank poorly compared to students from other countries international evaluations, but IMSA students are doing work usually reserved for upper division college students or even grad students. The rub is that the school only accepts students from Illinois — and it’s extremely selective. It houses around 650 students, all of whom have already scored well above average in the areas of math and science.
IMSA isn’t the answer to the country’s education problems, but its participatory learning model could certainly point other schools in the right direction. Former student Daniel Kador likes to say that he spent many of his IMSA Wednesdays playing video games — not learning to write them — but he recently joined forces with two other IMSA hall-mates, Kyle Wild and Ryan Spraetz, to found a San Francisco data analytics outfit called Keen IO, and like Peter Chu, all three will tell you that the Socratic methods instilled at them at the IMSA have taken them places they never would experienced otherwise.