Our Story

Teaching Garage began in 2013 as a project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Business School's iLab.

The short-term goal was to create a STEM curriculum that was easy and fun to teach in elementary schools. The long-term goal was to help close equity gaps by introducing young students to careers in STEM early on.

After piloting in Boston Public Schools classrooms and in private schools in suburban Philadelphia, two very different settings, we kept researching and found that classrooms across the country shared the same challenges in teaching engineering:

  • Little time to teach engineering as a separate subject

  • Costly kits that cover only narrow engineering topics

  • Limited teacher training in STEM

  • No standard framework for introducing engineering to young students

  • Difficulty engaging young learners with complex technical ideas

After extensive development and testing, Teaching Garage incorporated and launched Design SySTEM, our flagship curriculum, in 2014. It was designed around the experience of both teachers and students: easy to teach, affordable, age-appropriate, innovation-centered, and fun.

Experts from NASA, Google, and Bose contributed real-world engineering problems for students to solve, and advisors from education, publishing, and business helped shape both the curriculum and the company. What began as pilots in Boston and Philadelphia grew into a curriculum used by teachers in public, private, and charter schools across the U.S. and around the world.

 
 

Moving Forward: A Letter From Janice

Teaching Garage began long before I went to graduate school.

I was raised in one of the most ethnically diverse corners of New York City: Woodside, Queens. My parents were immigrants from South Korea, but our apartment building, our block, and my school were rich with cultures from around the world. One of the greatest gifts of my childhood was growing up alongside other children of immigrant families whose foods, cultures, and languages were different from mine. We grew up together, recognizing far more of our similarities than our differences. I count myself incredibly blessed for that upbringing.

Growing up in New York City also had its challenges, and as we grew, school became a daily effort to stay safe, to convince teachers that we wanted to learn, and to see the point of anything we were learning when daily life increasingly felt like a struggle or a dead end.

We grew up quickly, learning to navigate the pressure cooker of life beyond textbooks.

Over time, as I searched for meaning and happiness in an environment that often felt crushing, I came to understand this:

Everyone yearns for hope. And everyone deserves a chance to fulfill it.

The desire to give every child a hope and a future became the core of my life's work and the foundation of Teaching Garage. From a young age, I wanted my life to help change children's trajectories, and education was my means.

For ten years, Design SySTEM had the privilege of being used in classrooms across the U.S. and around the world. And though Teaching Garage has now wound down, Design SySTEM will remain free to access and download on this page because missions don’t end with a company.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey over the last ten years: the team, the teachers, the mentors, the supporters, and my own educators, for inspiring a little girl from Queens to set out on this path at all. Thank you for your love, grace, patience, and encouragement as I built Teaching Garage.

And to the educators who will keep using this curriculum: thank you. Thank you for your grace, and for joining me in the mission to change children's trajectories, to give them hope and a future.

You can follow what I'm building next at janicelathrop.com.

Soli Deo Gloria,

 
 

Janice Lathrop
Founder & CEO, Teaching Garage, Inc.