Rusty Greiff is Grockit’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer and a resident of the greater Washington DC area.  Rusty has an extensive background in politics and education.

My 8-year old son is a LEGO junky.  He goes through three basic steps to LEGO greatness:

1) he shuts the door to his room

2) he pours the 500 pieces of LEGOs on the floor

3) he lets it rip.

Skyscrapers, spaceships, laser-rovers; massive and intricate structures are built – most of the time with his brother and best buddy next door.  Often, I will peer through the crack in the door to assess their progress.  Rarely do they know where their LEGO journey will take them, but they are comfortable in leaping ahead together, adjusting the pieces, and brainstorming until the creation is complete, often ending in a multi-player “high five”.

Last week, I played and learned with my own set of LEGOs along with some of the most talented educators in the country at the KIPP Charter School’s Annual Summit in Nashville, TN.  Every year, KIPP brings its teachers, directors, funders, experts in the field and students together to discuss best practices.  Alongside KIPP’s finest teachers, administrators and students, I led a 90-minute session, LEGOs in hand, on collaborative and social learning.  The LEGO exercise and talk was meant to help participants better understand the impact of Grockit’s adaptive and collaborative platform as it is applied to KIPP schools.  Currently, Grockit and KIPP are partnering to connect California KIPP students in peer-peer SAT/ACT test prep, with the goal of mastering test prep content and improving scores through social learning.

Not surprisingly, bringing people together (with a massive box of LEGOs) with different learning styles, specific skill sets and expertise, can create a dynamic experience that translates into some beautiful results.

By way of examples, Grace, a KIPP teacher from Washington DC preferred working in a team of 2 to build the foundation while her colleague Jennifer created a three-story roof garden to attach to Grace’s structure.  A KIPP teacher from Newark encouraged her team to strategize first, drawing elaborate plans before finding color-coordinated LEGOs to complete the building.  One AP teacher demanded of his team, “Just have fun” and attacked the LEGOs, building a killer “car-house” that of course could fly.

The LEGO exercise and session was an easy demonstration of existing academic research suggesting that by engaging learners through social games, collaborative problem solving and peer-to-peer studying, companies like Grockit are helping learners master subjects and achieve higher test scores.  Literally, this is what we do at Grockit every day for our hundreds-of-thousands of students.