Important for parents

What is experiential learning

Experiential learning provides the environment and tools that help children to quickly understand new concepts, by extra stimulating the cognitive processes.

The term is defined by David Kolb, the initiator of the concept, as a process in which knowledge is created by transforming experience. Therefore, the most effective learning is the one you can control by experimenting.

It has been demonstrated that the learning process is much more effective when it is based on our own experience – an action, a problem or an event that creates the need for a better understanding. At Wow Lab we use scientific experiments and practical activities as the main anchors of this process, to stimulate children’s curiosity and enhance the acquisition of concepts an terms in the fields of physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology and first aid, fun mathematics and logic.

What are the benefits of participation?

By joining the Wow Lab programs, children improve both their critical thinking and argumentative abilities, as well as the overall understanding of the processes and phenomena around them. Our workshops are complementary to the formal education in schools, and may also represent a useful and fun alternative to spending free time.

Considering the topics and the teaching method, Wow Lab workshops help children to:

Enrich their knowledge about the natural phenomena
Understand and use specific terms and concepts, according to the studied sciences
Prepare for a better understanding of the theoretical notions taught in school
Develop personal abilities: presentation skills, individual and team work
Improve reflection, synthesis and analysis, innovation and creativity – by observing, understanding and explaining the effects of the experiments.

Who can participate?

The workshops are dedicated to all 5 to 12-year-olds interested in science, with a native curiosity to understand nature and the processes around, eager to stand out and to surprise their peers.

Children may be Romanian, English or French native speakers.

To sign up for our programs, there are three options:

Contact and sign up directly to one of our partners for open courses during the school year, such as Smart Education or British Council
If your school is not already a Wow Lab partner, you can ask them to submit a request so that we can form a group right there. The schools are open to parents’ suggestions for extra curricular activities.
Contact us through the form if you want us to send an offer to your school, to occasionally come to visit your class during the Scoala Altfel week or to invite us to an anniversary kids party.

What is Why-ology?

We have created this unique concept to shape our vision on learning through playing and experimenting in a relevant and memorable way. Our programs are designed to feed children’s curiosity and reveal accurate and exciting answers to their Why questions.

What is the Wow Lab mission?

Many times, the formal education system is mainly based on the theoretical information and less focused on the practical side or on the real life situations applicability of the theory. This happens either due to crowded curricula, lack of time or specific materials, or even due to insufficient human resources.

Wow Lab programs address a real challenge existing in the current formal education: the insufficient occasions and time to approach the practical side of science. Our mission is to capitalise on experimentation, observation and critical thinking in the learning process, complementary to the theoretical information obtained in school. Thus, children understand more easily the natural phenomena around, the connection between them and the scientific notions that they refer to. With us, learning is not based on memorising information, but on the direct interaction with the experiments the kids run for their own and on the quality of information.

How do we work?

Our teaching methods are child-centered and revolve around the principles of experiential learning. Each participant is actively involved in the development of his or her own experiment and works with a dedicated set of materials, individually or in small teams. The main objective is the children easily assimilate knowledge from their own experience. Thus, they learn in a way that makes them happy and helps them to make correct associations and easily retain information.

Wow Lab innovates both regarding the curricula, through specific science areas, adapted to the young children’s level of understanding and regarding the methodology, by enriching the experiential learning model with new working tools. Thus, in our workshops, besides the method of observation and demonstration, we use:

multi-sensory learning (capitalizing on the senses of hearing, hearing, smell, taste, smell)
mind mapping
multimedia materials
role play
debates