LearnStorm

My contribution to KhanAcademy's Bay Area learning program

If you haven't heard of KhanAcademy yet, check it out. Like now. Here's a link. 

Now that that's out of the way. I can tell you a bit about LearnStorm. 

LearnStorm lets KhanAcademy users in the Bay Area get points for themselves and their school by learning math skills. I think the best part is that you don't just get points based on how hard the math you're learning is--you get points based on how hard you're trying. 

To add to that, they have "Weekly Challenges," where you can share your thoughts on an aspect of learning through a creative medium. I've seen people make videos, writing, posters, drawings, and so many other incredible things. 

For the first few activities, I really didn't submit much. I'd just read through the activity and think about it. Finally, I decided I'd give it a try and actually submit something. 

The prompt was to make a growth mindset superhero. For those of you who don't know what a growth mindset is, I suggest you head on down to this link: Growth Mindset: You can learn Anything and find out. 

I spent about 3 days sketching and brainstorming and there was even a point when I wanted to give up. But I mustered up some motivation and finally came up with this:

What do you think?

I was really proud of it, but still nervous to submit. I almost didn't, but I'm soooo glad that I did. 

About a week later, it was featured in the LearnStorm blog!!! (It may take a little scrolling to get to it: Activity #3) I was absolutely thrilled; I literally got up and did a little happy-dance. 

If there's one thing I got out of this it's that you should never be afraid to put yourself out there, even if other people don't like it. If I had chickened out and decided not to submit this, no one would have seen my artwork. But because I was ready to put myself out there, now thousands of people have seen it.