One learns by doing, by being engaged, one step at a time, by making mistakes; one learns with and from peers, collaboratively, but also by reaching out to experts; one learns by sharing, debating, teaching, by confronting one’s ideas to the views of others and to experimental data

Georges Charpak / Founder of Main à La Pâte

In Mathematics, the use of hands-on educational material from a very early age contributes to encourage the natural curiosity of young children and their spirit of inquiry. Our aim is to develop their appetite and capacity for research, where “research” is defined as attempting to solve complex problems without having the required conceptual tools (or recipes) at one’s disposal. These methods, reinforced by daily exercises in mental math serve to establish a solid mastery of core math skills.
In secondary school, the Math Facts Lab (chantier calcul), a distinct element of the Maths curriculum from 6th to 10th grade, focuses on achieving fluency in the building blocks of math reasoning. When these tasks become automatic and fluency is achieved, students can turn to higher-level cognitive tasks. The Math Facts Lab is buttressed by a cloud-based adaptive spaced-repetition app which tracks each student’s individual progress and provides teachers with a comprehensive dashboard to monitor student commitment, achievement and progress.

In Middle School, the Scientific Inquiry Program (SIP) was conceived under the mentorship of George Charpak by the School’s science department in partnership with research scientists of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI), a prominent research university. The SIP is an integrated inquiry-based and problem-based science curriculum; its goal is to tackle “big questions” through hands-on scientific inquiry and to reference the history of science and scientists as the epic quest to “read the book of nature.” The program’s effectiveness is regularly evaluated in 10th grade with benchmarked PISA-type questions and has led to superior performance at the baccalaureates.