Our approach
How we work
A child learns best when two things come together. They feel themselves moving forward. And they know there is a person who knows them and believes they can do this. Everything we do is built from these two things.
A child stays with it when they feel themselves getting better
A child stays with something when they notice they are making progress. Every small step they see in themselves gives them the courage for the next one. Neuroscience from Erasmus University Rotterdam shows that we are most deeply absorbed, and least easily distracted, when we feel we are moving forward. This drive needs no reward from outside, the progress itself makes concentrating feel good. And it carries over weeks, not just in the moment. So staying with it is worth far more than a quick try.
Just within reach
What a child likes best is whatever is just within reach, not too easy and not too hard. That is no accident: the same research shows that learning progress is greatest at medium difficulty. So people stay longest with tasks that stretch them just the right amount. The person at their side shows them, quickly and kindly, what comes next. A mistake here is not a failure, it shows where the way leads on. And what a child tries out for themselves, they truly understand.
Someone who stays
Trust grows slowly, and only with people who stay. When a child feels that someone really knows them, they dare to do more. Isabelle Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, puts it simply: relationships are the foundation of learning. Close, sustaining relationships in the first years of school predict better results years later, even once family background and IQ are taken into account. A large study of Chicago schools found that schools with a great deal of mutual trust improved in reading and mathematics ten times as often as schools with little. That is why, with us, the same child comes to the same person every week, for a whole semester and often longer. That person thinks about the child between the sessions and brings back the question that was left open last week. The loveliest feeling for a child is that someone is counting on them and believes they can manage.
What a machine cannot do
Children today receive praise and affirmation far more often from machines than from people, by some estimates thirteen times as often. So the more screens there are around a child, the more the person beside them matters. A screen can praise a child without end, but it cannot believe in them. It does not notice when a child is sad or having a hard day. To find your way back to someone after a quarrel, a child can only learn that with a person. And a child who is only ever praised never learns to handle a disappointment, and that is exactly what a child needs in life.
Three paths, one aim
The Forscherbühne awakens wonder and makes science something children and young people in Basel can experience directly. The Learning Bus accompanies each child individually, at their own pace, reliably alongside a person who builds trust and makes development possible. With Brain and Society we bring current knowledge into school about how learning works, how social competence grows, and what part people and technologies play in education. Our work follows the principles of the Reggio Emilia approach: children are understood as active shapers of their own education, and their paths of learning are made visible. Three paths, one aim: to support children in understanding the world, growing into their potential, and feeling understood in what makes them singular.
Every child wants to understand, and to be understood.
Sources
- EDK, the Swiss conference of cantonal education ministers (ed.), Überprüfung der Grundkompetenzen (ÜGK) 2024, language of schooling and mathematics, 4th HarmoS year (second year of primary school), national report, 2026, uegk-schweiz.ch.
- Hairong Lu, Dimitri Van der Linden and Arnold B. Bakker, The neuroscientific basis of flow: Learning progress guides task engagement and cognitive control, NeuroImage 308 (2025) 121076, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
- Isabelle C. Hau, Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026; and, by the same author, Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education, PublicAffairs, 2025.
- Consortium on Chicago School Research, as cited in Hau, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026.
- Matthew Lieberman, as cited in Hau, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026.
- Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini and George Forman (eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 3rd edition, Praeger, 2012.
- The Royal Institution, History of the Christmas Lectures, rigb.org.