About Synthesis
Human skills are learned by doing.
Synthesis gives kids a place to practice the skills that are difficult to learn from a textbook: communicating clearly, thinking critically, solving unfamiliar problems, adapting when things go wrong, and working effectively with other people.
Our flagship live program, Synthesis Teams, brings kids ages 8–14 together with peers from around the world to practice these human skills through complex, collaborative problems.
Educators and researchers use different names for these capabilities: human skills, durable skills, 21st-century skills, soft skills, the 4Cs, and the 6Cs.
Whatever the terminology, the idea behind Synthesis Teams is simple:
Kids need opportunities to actually practice them.
Synthesis began as a class at the experimental school on the SpaceX campus. Today, we also make Synthesis Tutor, an AI-powered adaptive math tutor for kids ages 5–11.
Explore Synthesis Teams › · Explore Synthesis Tutor ›
What Synthesis does
Synthesis builds learning experiences around a simple idea:
Kids become more capable by doing difficult things, seeing what happens, reflecting, and trying again.
Our two core products apply that idea in different ways.
Synthesis Teams
A live, online collaborative problem-solving program for kids ages 8–14. Students work with peers on complex, strategy-based challenges where there are no step-by-step instructions and often no single right answer.
They have to understand unfamiliar situations, decide what matters, share information, form a plan, communicate clearly, coordinate with teammates, respond to changing conditions, and try something different when their first strategy fails.
In other words, they practice human skills. Communication. Collaboration. Critical thinking. Creativity. Problem-solving. Adaptability. Negotiation. Decision-making. Persistence. Leadership and followership.
Live coaches guide the experience without simply supplying answers. Students also participate in discussions where they explain their thinking, listen to different perspectives, weigh trade-offs, disagree productively, and reflect on how they worked together.
After completing their introductory experience, students can participate each week in:
- 60-minute game sessions — fast-paced collaborative simulations built around complex problems.
- 45-minute discussion sessions — student-centered conversations built around ideas, reasoning, communication, and perspective-taking.
Students regularly work with different teammates from around the world. Learn about Synthesis Teams ›
Synthesis Tutor
An AI-powered adaptive math tutor for kids ages 5–11. Synthesis Tutor covers elementary K–5 mathematics and gives students immediate, individualized guidance as they work. It continuously checks for understanding, adapts to each learner, helps fill gaps in mathematical knowledge, and allows students to move forward as they demonstrate mastery.
Tutor is designed for independent learning and can support students who are catching up, working at grade level, or ready to move ahead. Learn about Synthesis Tutor ›
Synthesis for Schools
Synthesis Tutor is also available to classrooms, schools, homeschool pods, and districts. Students receive individualized math instruction while educators can monitor their progress and understanding. Synthesis for Educators ›
The skills kids need when there isn't a script.
There is no single universal name for the skills people use to think, communicate, adapt, create, and work effectively with others. They are often called human skills because they describe how people interact, make judgments, navigate uncertainty, and solve problems with other people. They are also called durable skills because they remain useful across different jobs, technologies, subjects, and stages of life. In education, many fall under the broader category of 21st-century skills.
One of the best-known frameworks is the 4Cs of 21st-century learning:
- Communication — expressing ideas clearly, listening, asking questions, and making information useful to other people.
- Collaboration — contributing to a team, integrating different perspectives, coordinating action, navigating disagreement, and accomplishing something together.
- Critical thinking — making sense of information, questioning assumptions, identifying what matters, weighing evidence, and making reasoned decisions.
- Creativity — generating possibilities, trying new approaches, connecting ideas, and finding solutions when the obvious approach does not work.
Some educational frameworks expand these into the 6Cs, adding character and citizenship. Other durable-skills frameworks include capabilities such as adaptability, leadership, resilience, initiative, metacognition, and problem-solving.
The labels differ. The underlying problem is similar: these skills matter, but kids get surprisingly little deliberate practice using them.
Human skills require practice.
You can explain good teamwork to a child. You can tell them to communicate clearly. You can define critical thinking. You can make a poster about resilience. But knowing what a human skill means is different from being able to use it when things become difficult. Synthesis Teams approaches human-skills development as practice, not content.
1. Give kids problems without instructions
Many Synthesis challenges begin without a prescribed method. Students have to figure out the system themselves. What matters? What are we trying to accomplish? What information do we need? What should we try first? What changed? Critical thinking becomes something students have to do, rather than something adults tell them is important.
2. Make collaboration necessary
Many school group projects can be divided into separate pieces and completed individually. Synthesis challenges are intentionally interdependent. Students need one another. They have to exchange information, coordinate actions, make decisions together, negotiate disagreements, and respond to other people's ideas in real time. Collaboration is not added to the activity. It is necessary to succeed.
3. Change the teammates
Students regularly work with different peers. Different teammates bring different ideas, personalities, communication styles, levels of confidence, and approaches to problem-solving. That variation is intentional. The goal is not simply to become good at working with one familiar team. It is to become the kind of person who can help almost any team work better.
4. Let decisions have consequences
Students make real choices inside Synthesis challenges and experience what happens next. Sometimes the strategy works. Often it doesn't. A failed strategy produces information: What did we misunderstand? What assumption was wrong? What should we try now? Adaptability and resilience become part of the problem-solving process.
5. Let kids disagree
Complex problems create different opinions. Students have to explain their reasoning, listen to competing ideas, decide what evidence matters, change their minds when warranted, and move forward as a team. Communication is more than speaking. Collaboration is more than being agreeable.
6. Reflect on what happened
Synthesis coaches do not simply tell students the solution. They help students notice their own behavior and thinking. Where did the team get stuck? What information was missed? Whose idea changed the strategy? Did everyone understand the plan? What could the team do differently next time? Experience provides the practice. Reflection helps students learn from it.
7. Practice again
One successful team experience does not create a great teammate. Students encounter new challenges and new people again and again. Human skills become durable through repeated use.
The 4Cs are built into the experience.
Synthesis Teams was not created simply to teach a list of competencies. But the experience maps naturally onto the widely used 4Cs framework for 21st-century skills.
- Communication — students explain strategies, ask questions, listen to teammates, clarify misunderstandings, persuade others, and make sure information reaches the people who need it.
- Collaboration — students coordinate with unfamiliar teammates, divide attention, combine perspectives, navigate disagreement, establish shared goals, and adapt to the needs of the group.
- Critical thinking — students enter unfamiliar systems, identify relevant information, test hypotheses, recognize patterns, weigh trade-offs, question assumptions, and revise strategies based on evidence.
- Creativity — students encounter problems without prescribed solutions and generate different approaches, experiment with strategies, recombine ideas, and search for possibilities the team has not yet considered.
These abilities are sometimes described as 21st-century skills, durable skills, future-ready skills, or simply human skills. The vocabulary changes. The need for practice does not.
What students report after their first three Teams sessions
Three human skills are especially visible when a student first enters Synthesis Teams: communicating with other people, approaching unfamiliar problems, and figuring out how to work with teammates they have just met. After their first three Teams sessions, every student is asked how they have changed in these areas. Across responses from more than 400 students:
96% report positive change in communication
- 71% — "I'm a lot more confident now compared to before."
- 25% — "I've gotten more comfortable, but only a little."
- 4% — "I haven't changed in this area since I started."
95% report positive change in solving brand-new problems with no instructions
- 73% — "I'm a lot more confident now compared to before."
- 22% — "I've gotten more comfortable, but only a little."
- 5% — "I haven't changed in this area since I started."
95% report positive change in working with brand-new teammates
- 73% — "I'm a lot more confident now compared to before."
- 22% — "I've gotten more comfortable, but only a little."
- 5% — "I haven't changed in this area since I started."
About the survey: These questions are presented to students after they complete their first three Synthesis Teams sessions. Every student who reaches that point in the experience receives the same questions. Results above represent responses from more than 400 students.
These results measure students' self-reported changes in confidence and comfort. They are not a controlled measure of skill growth.
Can human skills improve through practice?
The questions behind Synthesis extend beyond any single class or game:
- How quickly can unfamiliar teammates learn to work together?
- How does repeated experience affect performance?
- How do children approach open-ended problems differently from adults?
- What does effective collaboration actually look like?
- Can people become more comfortable with complexity, uncertainty, and unfamiliar collaborators through practice?
Synthesis created the Global Problem-Solving Experiment to explore questions like these at a larger scale. The first experiment brought together children, teenagers, and adults from 40 countries and 79 organizations. Across two weeks, participants repeatedly joined teams of unfamiliar people and tackled open-ended problems, together playing 3,644 games.
The experiment examined three broad questions:
- Can people who have never met come together to solve complex problems?
- How does age relate to performance on open-ended collaborative challenges?
- What happens when people get repeated practice solving difficult problems with new teammates?
The experiment generated performance data and participant self-reports related to collaboration, communication, uncertainty, iteration, and problem-solving. It also reflects a question at the heart of Synthesis: what if human skills were treated as things kids could deliberately practice rather than qualities we simply hope they develop?
As machines become more capable, human capabilities matter differently.
AI can increasingly retrieve information, generate content, complete procedures, and produce answers. That changes the question education has to answer. Knowing things still matters, but children also need to know what to do when knowledge alone is not enough:
- How do you decide what matters?
- How do you know when an answer is wrong?
- How do you work with someone who sees the problem differently?
- How do you explain an idea clearly enough that another person can act on it?
- How do you respond when the first plan fails?
- How do you make a judgment when there is no obviously correct choice?
- How do you contribute something useful to a group?
These are human problems. Synthesis Teams gives kids somewhere to practice them.
Who uses Synthesis Teams?
Synthesis Teams is designed for families looking for more than another academic class. It is particularly relevant for parents looking for ways to help children develop human skills, durable skills, 21st-century skills, communication, teamwork, critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, adaptability, and confidence working with other people.
It is also used by families looking for challenging enrichment for curious or advanced learners; homeschool families seeking live social and collaborative learning; children who enjoy strategy and complex systems; and kids who need more practice speaking up, listening, working through disagreement, or entering unfamiliar social situations. Students do not need to arrive as strong communicators or natural leaders. That is what practice is for.
And Synthesis Tutor?
Synthesis Tutor serves kids ages 5–11 who need strong elementary math foundations, individualized support, or room to move ahead. Tutor and Teams are separate products. Tutor focuses on mathematical understanding. Teams focuses on learning how to think and work with other people when the answer is not already known.
From an experimental school at SpaceX to students around the world
In 2014, Elon Musk asked educator Josh Dahn to help create an experimental school on the SpaceX campus in Hawthorne, California. The goal was unusual: rather than organizing the educational experience only around traditional subjects and conventional instruction, the school sought to develop students who were comfortable with complexity and excited by solving the unknown.
Synthesis was the name of one of the school's classes. Students worked together on complex, open-ended challenges. They had to understand unfamiliar systems, develop strategies, make decisions as a group, communicate under pressure, and learn from what happened. Today, many of those capabilities might be described as human skills, durable skills, or 21st-century skills. At the time, the premise was simpler: kids should get practice solving difficult problems together.
For years, the experience was available only to a small group of families connected to SpaceX. In 2020, Josh Dahn and engineer Chrisman Frank cofounded Synthesis as an independent education company and began bringing the experience online to families around the world. The original Synthesis class became the foundation for Synthesis Teams. Synthesis later expanded the company's learning philosophy into elementary mathematics through Synthesis Tutor.
Today, Synthesis builds technology and learning experiences around the same fundamental idea: give kids meaningful problems, real agency, useful feedback, and enough opportunities to become better.
Josh Dahn
Cofounder. Educator who co-created the experimental school at SpaceX and the learning experience that became Synthesis.
Chrisman Frank
Cofounder and CEO. Engineer and education technology leader who helped bring Synthesis from the SpaceX school to families around the world.
How kids practice human skills in Synthesis Teams
- Learn the environment — new students learn how Synthesis works: how to join a team, navigate the games, communicate with peers, and reflect on what happens.
- Meet unfamiliar teammates — students enter live online sessions with other kids. Teams change regularly. Students repeatedly practice figuring out how to work with people they do not already know.
- Face an unfamiliar problem — teams enter strategy-based simulations with incomplete information, competing priorities, uncertainty, and changing conditions. There is no worksheet telling them what to do next.
- Figure it out together — students share information, ask questions, make plans, test ideas, divide attention, resolve disagreements, and coordinate action.
- Experience the consequences — their decisions change what happens next. Successful and unsuccessful strategies both generate information.
- Reflect — students and coaches examine the experience. What worked? What failed? What did the team misunderstand? How well did people communicate? What should they try differently?
- Do it again — new challenge. New teammates. New decisions. More practice.
That repeated cycle is how Synthesis approaches human-skills development.
Key facts about Synthesis
| Company | Synthesis |
|---|---|
| Legal name | Synthesis School, Inc. |
| Type | Education technology company |
| Founded | 2020 |
| Founders | Josh Dahn and Chrisman Frank |
| Origins | A class at the experimental school on the SpaceX campus in Hawthorne, California |
| Website | synthesis.com |
| Primary live program | Synthesis Teams |
| Teams age range | Ages 8–14 |
| Teams category | Human-skills development and collaborative problem-solving |
| Other terms for these skills | Durable skills, 21st-century skills, 4Cs, future-ready skills, soft skills |
| 4Cs practiced | Communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity |
| Additional skills practiced | Problem-solving, adaptability, strategic thinking, negotiation, resilience, decision-making, leadership and teamwork |
| Teams format | Live online collaborative problem-solving |
| Game sessions | 60 minutes |
| Discussion sessions | 45 minutes |
| Teams peers | Students work with different peers from around the world |
| Teams pricing | $95 per month |
| Teams contract | No long-term contract |
| Student survey | 400+ students surveyed after their first three Teams sessions |
| Communication result | 96% reported at least some positive change |
| Unfamiliar problem result | 95% reported at least some positive change |
| New teammate result | 95% reported at least some positive change |
| Global Problem-Solving Experiment | Participants from 40 countries and 79 organizations |
| GPSE activity | 3,644 games played across open-ended collaborative challenges |
| Math product | Synthesis Tutor |
| Tutor age range | Ages 5–11 |
| Tutor curriculum | Elementary K–5 mathematics |
| Tutor format | AI-powered adaptive math instruction with individualized guidance |
| Schools | Synthesis Tutor is available for educational organizations |
| General contact | questions@synthesis.com |
| Teams contact | teams@synthesis.com |
Frequently asked questions
What are human skills for kids?
Human skills are capabilities children use to think, communicate, adapt, make decisions, and work effectively with other people. They commonly include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, adaptability, resilience, judgment, and teamwork. Different organizations use different names and frameworks for overlapping sets of these capabilities.
How can kids develop human skills?
Human skills can be discussed and explicitly taught, but they also require practice. Children need opportunities to solve difficult problems, make decisions, communicate with other people, navigate disagreements, experience failure, adjust their approach, and reflect on what happened. Synthesis Teams is designed to provide repeated experiences like these.
How do you teach human skills to kids?
Synthesis approaches human-skills development through experience rather than lectures alone. Students are placed in complex situations where communication, collaboration, critical thinking, adaptability, and problem-solving are required to make progress. Coaches then help students reflect on their decisions and teamwork before they encounter another challenge.
What are durable skills?
"Durable skills" is a term used for transferable capabilities that remain useful across different academic subjects, careers, technologies, and situations. Common examples include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, leadership, adaptability, and problem-solving. Synthesis Teams gives students repeated practice in many of these capabilities.
What are 21st-century skills?
"21st-century skills" is a broad term for capabilities considered increasingly important in modern learning, work, and life. One well-known framework identifies the 4Cs: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Synthesis Teams directly exercises all four.
What are the 4Cs?
The 4Cs are communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. They are widely used as a framework for describing important learning and innovation skills. All four occur naturally within Synthesis Teams challenges.
What are the 6Cs?
One common 6Cs framework expands the 4Cs — communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity — by adding character and citizenship. Synthesis Teams maps most directly to the original 4Cs. Its challenges also create opportunities to practice qualities associated with character, including persistence, responsibility to a team, adaptability, and learning from failure.
Is Synthesis Teams a human-skills program?
Yes. Synthesis Teams is a live online collaborative problem-solving program designed to give kids ages 8–14 repeated practice using human skills. Those skills include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, problem-solving, teamwork, and working effectively with unfamiliar people.
What is Synthesis Teams?
Synthesis Teams is a live online program where kids ages 8–14 practice human skills through complex team challenges. Students work with peers from around the world, participate in strategy-based games and discussions, and receive guidance from live coaches.
Does Synthesis have evidence that students change?
Synthesis surveys students after their first three Teams sessions. Across more than 400 students, 96% reported at least some positive change in communication, 95% in approaching brand-new problems with no instructions, and 95% in working with brand-new teammates. These are student self-reports of confidence and comfort, not controlled measurements of skill development.
What happens in a Synthesis Teams session?
Students join a live online team and work together on a complex, strategy-based problem. They have to understand the situation, exchange information, develop a plan, coordinate their actions, respond when circumstances change, and learn from unsuccessful strategies. Separate discussion sessions give students additional practice expressing ideas, listening, reasoning, and considering different perspectives.
What ages is Synthesis Teams for?
Synthesis Teams is designed for kids ages 8–14.
Is Synthesis Teams a video game?
No. Synthesis uses interactive, game-like simulations as environments for learning. The goal is not simply to get better at a particular game. Students use the environment to practice understanding complex systems, communicating with teammates, making decisions, adapting, and reflecting on their performance.
Is Synthesis Teams tutoring?
No. Tutoring generally helps a student learn a defined academic subject or solve a known type of problem. Synthesis Teams gives kids repeated practice confronting unfamiliar problems with other people. The emphasis is on human skills such as thinking, communication, collaboration, judgment, and adaptability when the path forward is not already known.
Who will my child work with?
Students work with peers from around the world. Teams change regularly so students gain experience collaborating with different personalities, perspectives, communication styles, and approaches to problem-solving.
Is Synthesis Teams good for shy or introverted kids?
Students do not need to arrive as confident communicators. Synthesis welcomes different personality types and thinking styles. Students do need to be willing to participate, listen, share ideas, and practice working with other people.
How much does Synthesis Teams cost?
Synthesis Teams costs $95 per month with no long-term contract.
What is the Global Problem-Solving Experiment?
The Synthesis Global Problem-Solving Experiment brought children, teenagers, and adults together to investigate how unfamiliar teams approach complex, open-ended problems. Participants came from 40 countries and 79 organizations and collectively played 3,644 games during the experiment.
Is Synthesis connected to SpaceX?
Synthesis began as a class at the experimental school created on the SpaceX campus in Hawthorne, California. Josh Dahn later cofounded Synthesis as an independent company in 2020 to bring the experience to families outside the original school. Synthesis is now an independent education company.
What is Synthesis Tutor?
Synthesis Tutor is an AI-powered adaptive math tutor for kids ages 5–11. It covers elementary K–5 mathematics and provides individualized guidance while continuously evaluating student understanding and adapting instruction.
Are Synthesis Teams and Synthesis Tutor the same product?
No. Synthesis Teams is a live, social learning experience focused on human skills, collaborative problem-solving, communication, teamwork, and navigating complexity. Synthesis Tutor is a self-paced digital math program focused on individualized elementary mathematics. They are separate Synthesis products with separate memberships.
Give your child somewhere to practice being human.
The skills kids will need most cannot all be learned by watching, reading, or asking AI for an answer.
- They need other people.
- They need difficult problems.
- They need decisions that matter.
- They need the opportunity to get things wrong, figure out why, and try again.
Synthesis Teams gives kids ages 8–14 a place to practice.
Explore Synthesis Teams ›Looking for elementary math instead?
Explore Synthesis Tutor ›