Our Mission
Kuriosity Lab is a non-profit organization that offers educators and parents engaging, alternative strategies to educate and thrill the growing minds they nurture. We believe the most powerful learning happens through active experiences, especially during play and in nature. We offer tools that spark curiosity, games to learn academic skills through movement, and ways to learn by connecting with nature.
The Best Game in Town Podcast
The American education system is in tatters. As of the latest measurements in 2024, 40% of students had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness (CDC); 12th graders tested at multi-decade lows in reading and math (NAEP); and chronic absenteeism remains over 25% (U.S. Department of Education). So if the kids aren’t learning, aren’t showing up to class, and aren’t happy, things need to change.That’s why we created the Kuriosity Lab’s Best Game in Town podcast, to explore how to engage and excite students in learning and life. We plan to do this by interviewing educators about strategies and philosophies to engage students, experts and scientists about their findings in what reduces educational burnout and increases academic engagement, and individuals who have found a passion for learning through alternative means and charted their own unique course in their lives.
We hope to provide tools and information to parents, educators, and students that will help them rediscover curiosity and find joy and success in students’ academic journeys.
Hosted by
MARK GORDON
Mark Gordon is the founder and director of Kuriosity Lab, an experimental learning nonprofit that helps young people rediscover curiosity and joy in learning. His work focuses especially on students who feel disconnected or misunderstood in traditional schools. For more than 25 years he has pursued a simple question: why is learning so often the least engaging part of a young person’s life? That question has guided him since childhood and now shapes the work of Kuriosity Lab, which exists to help young people reconnect with learning, themselves, and the world around them.
Mark’s path reflects a deep belief in nonlinear learning. Over the years, he has taught at a Summerhill-inspired free school, lived alone in a hand-built off-grid cabin in the Vermont mountains, apprenticed with the dancer Anna Halperin, co-founded Sun Light and Power, California’s longest operating solar company, and produced large-scale historical theater events. In the mid 1990s, he returned to teaching with a renewed commitment to understanding how each student learns best. Working with hundreds of at-risk and disengaged youth, he saw that when students are trusted to follow their interests, motivation returns naturally. That insight led to courses like U.S. History Through Music and Inventors’ Workshop and eventually to the creation of two nonprofits, the AHA Learning Center and Kuriosity Lab, which now serves as a living laboratory for developing tools, games, and experiences that help young people discover how they learn and who they are.
