Our problem is similar to that of helping someone learn how to wiggle their ears. Everyone is born with the necessary muscles to do neat things with their ears, but due to lack of use, the brain's synapses that control the ear moving muscles seem to fade away and then the unused muscles atrophy to the point that few adults are aware that they ever had this unique capability. Before anyone can train the muscles that wiggle their ears, they first must "discover" where those lost synaptic connections are inside of their head. If those muscles have remained unused for a long time, the search for their synapses can be a very frustrating process. The same is true for a lost curiosity. Project Lab is a continuing experiment in perfecting an environment that will "gently tickle" a students synapses for curiosity until that student finally realizes that they are there and how to communicate with them.

It may take months before a student more or less trips across the right mental connections and suddenly begins experiencing the same joys that they experienced while "feeding their curiosity" during their pre-school days. From the moment of rediscovery, like a hungry stomach growling to be fed, their curiosity will demand answers to a seemingly endless series of divergent questions. When the answers are found, they will generate the fresh ideas that flow into their brain's critical thinking and creativity centers for analysis, expansion and connectivity. Without a strong curiosity to feed them with information, creativity and critical thinking skills will remain only a shadow of what they could or should be. Rediscovering their appetite for curiosity restores a persons sense of "wonder" and opens a door to a lifetime of exciting fun, adventure, study and exploration. Because of our culture's apparent lack of appreciation for this "God-given, internally motivating, appetite for knowledge", the curiosity door remains closed for millions of students who have no idea of what they are missing.

NOTE: We seldom meet anyone that does not think that they have a great curiosity, but when their observed curiosity is ranked on our one-hundred percent curiosity chart, most people's curiosity falls between one and two percent. We refer to them as having only a "whimpy, intellectual curiosity". Most people simply haven't got a clue as to what a really strong curiosity is all about.

We have found that Project Lab is not for every youth. There seems to be a minority of less than thirty percent of the youth population that have found success in the Project Lab program. This successful minority is endowed with the special genetic characteristics that we call "the Edison trait". These Edison trait youth excel in projecting and have proven themselves to have great potential for creative explorations in science and engineering. These youths seem to have at least ten times more curiosity, think differently, behave differently, perceive their world differently and mature at a different rate than do their more typical peers. Like Thom Edison, many of these youth have a difficult time in conventional schools. We believe that this is so because they are being measured with the wrong yard stick. We believe that one reason for Project Lab's success with these youths is that we are working with their outstanding abilities in conceptual thinking as opposed to forcing them to rely on rote memorization, which is an area that many of these youth seem to be weak in. We work hard at creating a curiosity tickling environment during each Project Lab session, but those youth who profit most from our work are those whose parents allow them to extend our special environment into their home. The following message will outline some of the principles we operate by and some of the ways that you can help in making the magic of Project Lab work for your youth.

Project Lab belongs to the youth! For Project Lab to work properly, we have discovered that the youth must feel that they have ownership over its operation, as well as in their projects. The adults are there as confidants, guides, consultants, facilitators and mentors. The youth choose what they want to work on, how long they want to work on it, and in what direction they wish their work to progress. The youth teach themselves by asking succinct and educated questions. The adults help the youth find answers for their questions, but seldom actually teach anything. We have found that the large majority of the youth entering Project Lab have little idea of how to use their curiosity or what a powerful asset their curiosity is to self-directed learning. We are constantly faced with the apparent dilemma of which comes first, the knowledge or the questions.

Over the years we have gradually come to the conclusion that God has equipped the Edison trait youths with the ability to make great leaps in understanding with only meager data with which to work. We have come to believe that this is a form of intuition and is one of the genetic characteristics that gives Edison trait youth their extraordinary abilities. In a conventional educational (teaching) environment, curiosity-driven intuition is seldom used, and remains pretty much undeveloped. One of the fascinating aspects of question asking is that often the process used in preparing the mind to ask a meaningful question, also produces the answer without the question ever being asked. Project Lab does not offer lesson plans, text books, pre-digested experiments, standardized tests, enforced enrollment or attendance, bells, seating arrangements, age separation, or many of the other artificial artifacts of conventional education. Because many youth expect Project Lab's adult mentors to act like conventional teachers, there is often some initial confusion. The problems usually clear up when the student discovers the sheer joy and satisfaction that they derive from self-directed, curiosity driven exploration of technical problems in which "they" have a deep-rooted interest.

For many youth, Project Lab does not stop at the end of each meeting. When a youth begins doing some of their serious projecting at home, we know that their lives have been changed forever. After a youth discovers the pleasure of self directed accomplishment, it slowly permeates their entire way of life, and is no longer limited to being a classroom activity. One of Project Lab's primary goals is to liberate our students from a dependency on others in order to learn. Most of the Project Lab youths who stayed in the program for more than six months find technical projecting such a joy that they build lifetime hobbies and/or careers based on their self-directed explorations.

Many Project Lab parents participate in their youth's tinkering and explorations by supporting these activities in their home. The following is a list of ways that parents have been able to help their youth in developing a love for tinkering and invention.

1) Tools: Parents can assist their youth in assembling a personal set of tools that they will use for years to come. Beginning students need only simple tools and the more sophisticated ones can be acquired as the student's projects and requirements become more sophisticated.

2) Work area: Dedicating an area in the home where their youth can tinker to their hearts content, e.g., a semi-private area of their own, where they can work without the need for being tidy. A place that is "Kid Proof" where such things as holes in the furniture, solder blobs and chemical spills will not set off a round of parental recriminations.

3) Junk pile: Letting your youth collect stuff. Possibly the most important of all concessions is that your youth be allowed to keep a pile of what most parents consider "PURE JUNK". From this coveted pile of "treasures" come their "Dreams Of The Possible". Though most of these dreams will never reach fruition in childhood, they are, nevertheless, precisely where the great inventions of the adult are borne. Without having had these dreams in their youth, their adult capabilities will be more barren and far less creative. Those parents who are not projecteers have great difficulty understanding the bond between a youth and his junk, and have no idea of the long term damage they do when they discard such treasures without permission and willing consent;

4) Take-A-Parts: Asking your friends and business relations to bring you their broken and unused household, business and industrial equipment. Not only will these items be a source of zero-cost parts for projecting, but during the process of their disassembly, parts classification and storage, your youth will get a broad, first hand education in how things work, fastening-technologies, materials application, and a huge range of engineering subtleties that they will not even be aware that they have learned until they have use for them in their own designs. An equivalent formal education cannot be purchased at any price.

5) Indulgence: Successful Project Lab youth are truly a special breed apart, and are not at all like their peers. As with young Edison, our Project Lab youth have an inner need to try many, many different and divergent experiments. You can be assured that some of these experiments will end up in one form of disaster or another. To the average parent, or more conventional thinking school age peer, such experimentation may seem totally odd or even downright crazy; but successful and creative engineers, inventors, explorers and entrepreneurs all recognize these exploits as an expression of genius, and a form of self preparation for the great things that these very special youth will achieve later in life. We have found that the best way to protect these youths from harming themselves is to let them have their inevitable accidents while they are young. Constantly limiting their activities in an attempt to keep them from getting hurt, or doing damage to something, only pushes the time for their seemingly wild experimentation to a later date. At this later date, not only will their exploits be more ambitious, but they will have access to more dangerous and powerful tools and techniques which, if they have not learned how to protect themselves, will only make matters worse. As a youth suffers an inoculation to prevent a dangerous disease, letting them experience the consequences of their actions at an early age, goes a long way toward protecting them from far more serious harm when they become teenagers. (Just keep plenty of ice, Band Aids and scratch medication on hand).

If your youth displays the "Edison Trait" aptitudes, please be indulgent of his seemingly strange lifestyle and curiosity driven proclivity for what most parents might call "mischief" or "getting into trouble". (The term "mischief" deserves further definition. Edison trait youth are not bad kids, who do bad things with malice-of-forethought, they are instead, kids that are filled with the spirit of wonder and in the process of searching out reasons for "things being the way that they are", they seem to constantly be at the edge of acceptable behavior. They don't look for trouble, but trouble seems to follow them wherever they go). Their experiments and adventures that go awry are some of the best teachers your Edison Trait youth will ever have, and the lessons that are learned will be long remembered. These youth are definitely different in many ways and in Project Lab's collective opinion, deserve a much longer leash and far more understanding than they are usually given in today's complicated world.

The Front Door into Project Lab is open to all youths. Unfortunately, nearly eighty percent of the youth population do not have the necessary aptitudes, curiosity and/or creativity (the Edison traits) that they will need in order to find much success in our program. Because of this lack of native talent, we have found that Project Lab must also have a back door, or in other words, a way for youth to safely, and without embarrassment, leave the program. Most youths soon know whether Project Lab is to their liking or not, and those that don't find meaning in our work, usually are very happy to leave of their own volition. Because of the extreme distractibility of Edison Trait youth, any youth that doesn't work on their own projects, but who instead seems to take some form of perverse pleasure in preventing others from working on theirs, will be asked not to come to Project Lab meetings until they can conclusively demonstrate that they are ready to do some serious projecting and that they are prepared to interact with the other youth in a constructive and positive manner. The decision of who is not welcome is ordinarily made by an informal, majority vote of the youths in Project Lab. Project Lab is not a baby sitting service ! Even though a youth is obviously having fun working on his/her project, for them, it is still a pretty serious business. We feel that it is the adults responsibility to buffer the projecteers from those youth who are sitting around with their minds engaged only on frivolous activities. Because creativity ebbs and flows over time, there are moments when most any youth is pretty useless. Unfortunately, an undirected youth can consume an incredible amount of resources while just fiddling around. Therefore, there may be times when we ask parents to pick a youth up before quitting time. It is simply not fair to those members who are tuned in and turned on to their project, to have to compete for tools, mentors or other resources, with someone who is wasting time for that day. On occasions we have seen one un-focused youth derail an entire group of projecteers. If that should happen very often, our unpaid, highly talented, very busy, volunteer mentors will simply not come back if they get the feeling that all they are accomplishing is a baby sitting service.

When a youth first joins Project Lab, they usually have had little experience with what we call "hyper- focus" and will ordinarily have a relatively short attention span. These youth seem to profit greatly by having a shorter work time. Eventually, when and if they catch on to the hi-powered, low-key excitement of self-directed-learning, short of dragging them off by their ear, there will be no way that we can get these same youth to leave their projecting before quitting time. Time adjustment seems to be self regulating as determined by the youths either being bored to tears or their literally bouncing with excitement over their latest idea. We have found that there is a negative consequence in trying to work with a youth past the time that their attention span has turned off, and we therefore request that parents work closely with us in whisking their youth off to different activities shortly after they have mentally shut down. As in learning to wiggle ones ears, learning to use "hyper-focus" while projecting is a matter of learning how to reach inside of ones subconscious and turn on an invisible switch. For some youth, this is a very natural way of "being" and their parents and teachers say (as mine did) "Oh-Oh, Bill has gone into outer space"! For other youth, finding their hyper focus switch remains an invisible, and unfathomable mystery that may take months for them to solve. Non-Edison-trait youth (the other eighty percent of the youth population) seem to entirely lack the ability to ever experience "hyper-focus".

Punishment And Rewards: If your youth has the Edison Trait, and if we mentors are having fun, there is a distinct possibility that he/she will find Project Lab to be one of the most fun experiences and exciting adventures that they have ever undertaken. Some parents and teachers perceive this high level of interest as a psychological tool that they can use as a lever with which to pry some particularly desired behavior from the youth. For example, some parents have threatened that Project Lab participation will be denied unless the youth does this or that parentally desired activity. Others, desperate for their youth to succeed at something, offer rewards if and when their youth accomplishes a project. Our students do have fun; and we have been criticized for our lack of classroom decorum. The fact is that most of our students are totally unaware of how very much that they are actually learning. We now believe that learning could be, should be, and is the most exciting event that these youth can experience. It is only when they are being "taught" in the conventional sense, that their lives become miserable. My point is that Project Lab students are definitely engaged in an educational endeavor from which they receive a great deal of benefit. We therefore ask that parents try to remain neutral, but interested, in what goes on at Project Lab. Because creativity is a very precarious gift that will run and hide at the slightest provocation, we try very hard to maintain a creative and psychologically safe environment at the Project Lab meetings. Any excess psychological baggage or demands that a youth brings with them seems to short circuit their creativity. Parents that would like to give rewards for projects that get completed, seem not to understand that few projects are ever completed in Project Lab.

We never ask our youth to finish up one project before starting another. If a project gets completed that's fine, but more often we find that in the process of working on one project, many of our youths discover "new horizons" and freshly opened "doors to new ideas". They ask us if they can stop what they are doing and pursue this or that new avenue of thought. They usually assure us that they will finish their current project later, but experience has repeatedly demonstrated that their current project has simply been a stepping stone to bigger and better things, and within a short time, they will have advanced way beyond their need to go back and work on such simple stuff. The point is that they may go for several years without ever completing a project, and at the same time they will effortlessly, and with a great amount of pleasure, have gained practical knowledge that can easily eclipse that of a college engineering graduate. God designed these Edison trait youth in such a way that their interest in the work itself is all of the reward that they need. In other words, their rewards for such work are built into their human psyche and external punishment or rewards which are based on the quality or quantity of their work, only messes up their freedom to be flexible in satiating their curiosity driven search for knowledge. One of our most difficult mentoring functions is helping youth arrive at the point where they start experiencing and appreciating their own internal rewards.

Parent Participation: Parents are always invited to participate in or visit Project Lab. There are, however, more rules and regulations for parents than there for their youth.

1. Project Lab is designed exclusively to deliver a program to youth. Once Project Lab gets a foothold and a youth is taking charge of their own project, their current interest and needs will be controlling many aspects of the meeting. Visiting parents must not distract from that process through their presence.

2. There will be plenty of opportunity for talking about Project Lab matters with the staff between meetings. We have had parents come to Project Lab, get their feelings hurt, and complain that they were being ignored. That true! They were! If even one child is still in attendance, the staff has been instructed to (and need to) give him/her their full attention. Please do not expect special attention while Project Lab is in session. And above all, please don't ask one of our mentors to stop for a visit. They may not appear busy at the moment; but in their heads, they are juggling the progress and problems of all the youth that they have been working with and though they may be on a brief respite, they invariably will soon be confronted with the next round of questions that they must find answers for.

3) If you come for a visit, please pretend that your youth is not there. Some of the most embarrassing moments in project Lab have been when a parent dropped in and proceeded to make a fuss over what their youth was, or was not, doing. One mother agreed to this condition and then, after about ten minutes into her visit, shouted from across the room for Johnny to stop picking his nose. Johnny didn't come back to project Lab for over a month.

4) If you come for a visit, we suggest that you circulate around and ask various youth (other than your own) what they are doing, and see if they can explain their project in terms that you can understand. Kids seem to really enjoy telling about their work, and discussing it with an outsider not only helps develop communication skills, but by asking them to tell something about what they are doing, may help them get on top of some of the nebulous, abstract concepts that they are coping with. Do not, under any circumstances, try to teach these youth anything. We have had well meaning engineers and other technically based people come to Project Lab with the idea that the kids are just itching to hear what they have to say. Nothing could be further from the truth. These youth are rank beginners who are gingerly following lines of reasoning that have taken weeks for them to get where they are. A few words from an "expert" as to how to do it better will completely derail their forward motion and like a burst balloon, they may not be able to regain their enthusiasm for that particular project. Suggestions must be made to the youths mentor so that it can be gently incorporated into the scheme of their creativity. All such suggestions will be given full credit as to who actually proposed them.

5) We are the first to recognize that the Project Lab program is far from perfect, however it is the current blend of fifteen years of experimental trial and error, extensive literature studies, experience sharing, and collective personal insight from mentors who have joined us in our work. By far and large, our best teachers have been the outstanding youth that we have work with. If you wish to offer suggestions on how to work with Project Lab youth or how to change Project Lab in some way, then we suggest that you attend at least three months of actual Project Lab sessions as observer/helper. In that length of time, the subtle and delicate nuances of Project Lab existence will become more clear, and we will have both gained a mutual experience-base from which to discuss any proposals for change. We hope that you will join us, we always need your help.