Explorers Build
Explorers Build
Calling on explorers ages 8–16. Turn muddy water clear. Design a home on Mars. Prove what you can do.
An expedition is an 8-week build project that a small crew of explorers plans, tests, defends, and ships together. Real materials. Real work. Something you made.
Some expeditions have your crew each building the same thing side-by-side, comparing solutions. Others have all of you joining forces on one build no one could finish alone. You finish with something you show to your family and your peers — and defend to both.
The work is hard. It's not for everyone. Some will say it can't be done. If this sounds like you — welcome aboard.
Ages 8–16. Curious enough to ask why, stubborn enough to iterate past the first failure. You own the build.
Three to five explorers working the expedition with you. Every voice matters — and every disagreement teaches you something.
A human guide who runs your weekly 90-minute session — in-person for local crews, virtual for distributed ones. Keeps the science honest. Holds the frame. Never solves the problem for you — asks the questions that let you solve it yourself.
An AI teaching assistant designed to teach by asking the hard questions, not by giving you answers. Available between sessions. Remembers what you already know. Never runs out of patience.
Every expedition starts with something you'd want to build — a working water filter, a habitat for Mars, a tile pattern only you designed. Each one maps to IB learning outcomes your school expects you to master.
Right now: 20 expeditions ready. About 100 more in the pipeline. Here are five, picked at random.
Turn muddy river water clear — then explain the science that made it happen. Chemistry meets engineering meets a real-world problem two billion people still face.
Design a place humans could live on Mars or the Moon. Food, water, air, temperature, radiation. Space engineering forces you to solve what Earth solves quietly, every second.
Transform ordinary ingredients into completely new food — sauerkraut, yogurt, sourdough, kombucha — using invisible microbes as your workforce.
Design a Portuguese-tradition tile pattern that tessellates correctly — then explain the geometry that makes it work. Math you can see on every Lisbon street.
Find your position on Earth using tools 500-year-old Portuguese explorers relied on — a compass, an astrolabe, the sun and stars. Understand why GPS works, from scratch.
Five explorers. Eight weeks. 25 iterations. Real rotational-dynamics physics. Real 3D printers at the Lisbon FabLab. A Beyblade four times better than what money can buy — and a portfolio piece good enough for a CREST Gold. Here's how the crew pulled it off.
See how the crew did itHere's what an 8-week expedition looks like from the inside. Your shared crew map. Weekly milestones. Optional sidequests. And, when you finish, the way we show your school which IB outcomes you've hit.
The hardest part wasn't the science — it was convincing my crew that the smaller filter would beat the bigger one. Then the data came in and we saw it. That's when it clicked.
Explorers ages 8–16 who like making things, testing ideas, and asking why. Families comfortable with an 8-week rhythm and the idea that real learning is sometimes messy. Educators and school leaders who want an enrichment program that maps to their curriculum and produces portfolios you can actually look at.
Every €300 an explorer's family pays sponsors another explorer to run the same kind of expedition — through partners on the ground in Kenya's refugee camps and Afghanistan (where explorers learn from home). At roughly a 1:1 ratio.
€300 per explorer per expedition. Each expedition runs 8 weeks. This covers materials, captain time, first mate access, and portfolio hosting.
Not yet.
Travel. Some expeditions include field visits — to a museum, a river, or a partner fabrication lab where the build actually happens. Priced separately at cost, opt-in.
3–5 hours per week per explorer. One 90-minute captain-led session plus 1–3 hours of at-home experimenting between sessions. Across 8 weeks: 24–40 hours total.
Either. For our September 2026 Lisbon pilot, sessions are in-person. For distributed crews — explorers across different cities or countries — sessions are virtual with the captain leading from wherever they are.
Tell your captain beforehand. If you can, join the huddle virtually so you don't fall behind. If you still can't, we'll consider a catch-up session with your captain.
We design expeditions so most explorers can learn and succeed, whatever their starting point. What we filter for is motivation — are you actually curious about this, or are you doing it because someone told you to?
Join the waitlist. When we open a cohort in your city, we'll invite waitlisted families to a short conversation with a captain. No test.
You'll pick it up. Curiosity and hard work will carry you further than a head start.
In participating schools or in explorers' homes. A lot of the build work happens in partner fabrication labs when the expedition needs tools we can't ship to your kitchen table.
Adults with real subject-matter expertise and a track record teaching young learners. Engineers, scientists, teachers, artists who've done the thing themselves and can teach it — not lecture it. Every captain is vetted before they're paired with a crew.
Small crews of 3–5, typically ages 8–9 or 10–12. Multi-age crews work well for many expeditions.
You can tell us which ones you're interested in and we'll take that into account. But we only launch an expedition when we have a full crew for it — so sometimes the wait depends on other explorers signing up too.
You can tell us who you'd like to work with and we'll take it into account — no guarantees. We encourage you to work with explorers who have different backgrounds and different learning, communication, and collaboration styles. That's part of what you learn.
Not currently. What you walk away with is a portfolio piece — the expedition documented end-to-end — plus a letter of recommendation from your captain when you complete the work well.
Every expedition is mapped to specific IB PYP (ages 8–12) or MYP (ages 11–16) learning outcomes. What you actually learn depends on which expeditions you pick and how far into the sidequests you go — we can show you the coverage per expedition.
A polished portfolio piece for each expedition — the challenge, what you built, the science behind it, iterations you tried, and a family + peer showcase where you defend the build in front of both. Real evidence you can show.
We give the coverage documentation to your school. What they do with it is up to them.
Ayan is an engineer (IIT · MIT) who has spent the last twenty years commercialising new technology — first as a McKinsey consultant, then across a series of startup operating roles.
He's building Explorers Build because the AI world needs young people who can think, build, and argue — not memorise. The initial Lisbon cohort has him as the captain. As the program grows, he steps into the harder work of finding, training, and backing the next captains in the next cities.
Read Ayan's LinkedInTell us who you are, where you're based, and what you're curious about. We'll be in touch as we open cohorts near you.