About Myself
My name is Feng, founder of Cuddles Learning. The company is based in Toronto and offers services nationwide. Today marked the 11th year since I came to Canada.
As a Chinese immigrant, I spent most of my school years, from elementary school through university, in China.
Similar like North American education system but at a much higher degree, China focuses on elevating students' performance much more than sustaining students' long term interests.
The Significance of Project Based Learning
Different from some of my fellow Chinese students, I really suck at math most of my school years, main reason is that I didn't know why I need to sit in the classroom and learned the things I was taught, especially when majority of the information I was forced to memorize by my teachers seemed to have very little personal relevance to me, so the more disconnected I felt, the poor I did at school and the more discouraged I got, it became a malicious cycle.
My previous role was in retail banking, where I promoted investment and lending products to customers, it was just because of this experience that I realized what I enjoyed most wasn't closing the deals but empowering customers by educating them about financial literacy, so I kept wondering if kids can have some basic financial knowledge, it will make a huge impact in their adulthood.
When I co-founded my first company during the pandemic, it provided online tutoring services to local kids, my co-founder and I introduced a basic financial literacy course and it was wildly popular among kids cause we use real life examples to demonstrate abstract ideas such as supply, demand, equilibrium, cost, etc.
Through a few years of interacting with students and staff, I discovered that kids will become more engaged and motivated if they feel strong personal relevance to academic topics.
Elon Musk, I know he sometimes can be very extreme, when asked during an interview with Khan academy founder Sal Khan about his opinion on education system, said that many kids are puzzled and wondered why they were there at school because they were never taught why they learn the things six hours a day. I founded Cuddles Learning to provide students a safe and playful environment, and its mission is to educate kids the why of things and make them understand the purpose through game based and problem based learning.