Weekend Workshop · Ages 12–14
A two-day workshop for curious minds
Four 90-minute sessions built around one question: how do you actually know what you think you know? Students investigate their own minds and discover they are stranger, more fallible, and more interesting than expected.
Four sessions. One running question.
Every session approaches the same problem from a different angle: the gap between what you think is happening and what is actually happening: in memory, in evidence, in money, and in perception. By the end of the weekend, students have first-hand experience of each gap, and a vocabulary for talking about why it exists.
Grow Your Brain
"Your brain is not a recording device. It's a prediction machine."
Students begin with a test they don't know they're taking, and end with evidence, drawn from their own minds, that memory is less reliable than it feels. Along the way: what neuroscience says about the nature of ability, a tour through ideas that history got badly wrong, and a 2,500-year-old technique for remembering almost anything.
Think like a scientist: how do you know when you're right?
"The scientific method isn't a recipe. It's a set of defences against fooling yourself."
Students open with a story about how an entire scientific field, working with real data, peer review, and decades of research, turned out to be confidently wrong. They then design and run their own experiment, generate more data than they can cleanly interpret, and discover why replication is harder than it sounds. The session closes on the same question it opened with: unanswered, but better understood.
Money matters: why don't you do what you know you should?
"The system isn't neutral. It's designed. And knowing that is your best defence."
Students already know, roughly, that spending less than you earn is sensible. So why is it so hard? This session makes the case that the difficulty is largely engineered, built into the way financial products, prices, and payment systems are designed. Students learn the names of the cognitive traps being exploited, then build a budget structured specifically to defend against them.
Mind-bending illusions: why can't you unknow a trick?
"The knowing part of your mind and the seeing part are not the same system."
This session is about something stranger than memory errors or cognitive biases: a part of the mind that rational knowledge simply cannot reach. Students explore what happens when you know something to be true and your perception refuses to agree, map a gap in their own vision they've never noticed, and end by trying to design something that keeps working on an audience that already knows the secret.
FAQ
-
The two-day workshop is made up of four 90-minute sessions, each built around a different big idea. Your child won't be sitting and listening; they'll be doing. Depending on the session, they might be running a memory experiment on themselves, interrogating a misleading graph, debating a tricky question with their peers, or building a logical argument from scratch. Every session ends with something made or discovered that they can take home.
-
The workshop is designed for children aged 12 to 14. This is a particularly rich window; children this age are beginning to think abstractly, question what they're told, and form their own views about the world. The workshop meets them exactly there.
-
Each batch has a maximum of 12 children. This isn't a lecture; it's a conversation, and real conversation requires a room small enough for every voice to be heard.
-
Just themselves, a pencil box, and a willingness to think. All other materials are provided, and no laptops or devices are needed; every session is entirely hands-on and in-person. Comfortable clothes are recommended since sessions are active and informal. If your child has a notebook they like to write in, they're welcome to bring it, but it isn't required.
-
Any child who has ever asked "but why?" and meant it. Children who enjoy arguing their corner, who notice things others miss, who get frustrated when lessons don't go deep enough, will tend to take to this immediately. But quieter, more hesitant children often discover something important about themselves in these sessions too. Curiosity takes many forms, and the workshop is designed to meet most of them.
-
Yes. The two-day workshop is the entry point to The Idea Odyssey: a full three-year programme for children aged 12 to 14 covering eighteen modules across six terms, from logic and data literacy to philosophy, ecology, and systems design. The workshop gives your child (and you) a genuine taste of the methodology before any longer commitment. Many families find it the natural first step. You can explore the full programme here.