What is a Learning Experience? 1 of 3

In life, any activity could be considered a learning experience. Shooting baskets in your driveway or fishing in a creek might not be the first things that come to mind.

But try thinking about those things backwards, from the future. For someone who is now a professional basketball player or a fishing champion, these activities were definitely part of the learning process, right?

What Foundry means by "learning experience" could also include just about any activity, as long as there is a plan, and the outcome of that plan is to develop a specific skill or skills. 

It could be a whole year course in speaking French, a 1-day workshop on healthy eating, a 15-minute science vocabulary lesson, or anything in between. 

An experience plan starts with a goal or outcome for learning. We try to state that goal as something you will be able to do as a result, like,

• 'I will be able to bake a banana bread' or
• 'I will be able to point to areas on a map and explain what the landscape is like and what animals might live there' or
• 'I will be able to multiply two fractions and draw a picture of what the result looks like.' 

In Foundry, these goals are known as learning targets. When your school does a lot of project-based learning, projects tend to combine learning targets from different areas, instead of just focusing on one at a time.

A project about the pyramids of Egypt, for example, might explore math (why did they pick that shape?), engineering (how did they build them and long did it take?), or ancient Egyptian politics or religion (why did they build them?)

The whole purpose of Foundry is to keep track of what you learn in all those different learning areas.

Next: Besides goals and targets, what else is in a learning experience? 

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