Explorers Build
Explorers Build
Hand-picked from a longer list of 177 candidates, filtered against eight design criteria — age fit, STEM breadth, IB alignment, wow factor, feasibility, materials, depth, and durable skills. The five we launch with in September 2026 are marked FLAGSHIP.
Turn muddy river water clear — then explain the science that made it happen. Chemistry meets engineering meets a real-world problem two billion people still face.
Full details after signup →Design a place humans could live on Mars or the Moon. Food, water, air, temperature, radiation. Space engineering forces you to solve what Earth solves quietly, every second.
Full details after signup →Transform ordinary ingredients into completely new food — sauerkraut, yogurt, sourdough, kombucha — using invisible microbes as your workforce.
Full details after signup →Design a Portuguese-tradition tile pattern that tessellates correctly — then explain the geometry that makes it work. Math you can see on every Lisbon street.
Full details after signup →Determine your position on Earth using tools 500-year-old Portuguese explorers relied on — a magnetic compass, an astrolabe, the sun and stars. Understand why GPS works, from scratch.
Full details after signup →Redesign one real block of a city — the block you walk through every day — to make it safer, greener, more welcoming. Then defend the redesign to real residents.
Full details after signup →Design and build a small house that survives an earthquake, a flood, or a windstorm. Lisbon 1755 taught engineers what to do about it — you'll retrace their steps.
Full details after signup →Design a device that solves a real problem for a real person you know. Not a general product — one person, chosen by you, whose life gets a little easier because of what you built.
Full details after signup →Build a battery from household materials that actually powers a small LED. In 1800 Alessandro Volta stacked metal and salt-soaked cardboard and did the same thing for the first time.
Full details after signup →Systematically trick an image-recognition AI at least five different ways — and understand why AI can be so confident and so wrong at the same time. Learn what AI safety engineers actually do.
Full details after signup →Design and build a marble run that reliably delivers a marble from top to bottom in a predicted time within ±20%. Physics you can hold in your hands.
Full details after signup →Build a machine that does one simple task — turn on a light, pour a cup of water — through a chain of five or more clever mechanisms. Absurdly overcomplicated engineering, taught seriously.
Full details after signup →Build a machine that draws on its own — controlled by mechanics, geometry, or simple circuits — and produces art you couldn't have drawn by hand.
Full details after signup →Build a working pinhole camera and capture images without a lens. The camera obscura was known to Chinese philosophers in 400 BC — every camera since is built on the same principle.
Full details after signup →Build a device that captures plastic waste from a real local river. Categorise what you find. Almost every piece of ocean plastic started as river plastic — you can measure the story.
Full details after signup →Design and build a habitat that attracts real bees, wasps, and other pollinators. Monitor who moves in. Populations have fallen by more than half in the last fifty years.
Full details after signup →Test cork against real engineering challenges — insulation, buoyancy, compression, water resistance — and understand why this Portuguese-signature material behaves the way it does.
Full details after signup →Study one of Europe's most biodiverse wetlands at Lisbon's doorstep. Identify ten species, measure water quality, produce an ecosystem report grounded in your own observations.
Full details after signup →Create a book that pops, slides, folds, and puzzles as the reader turns each page. Paper engineers use the same mechanics as automotive designers: linkages, hinges, folds, tension.
Full details after signup →Build a self-sustaining terrarium — sealed, no water added, no food added — and watch it evolve for weeks. In 1972 a British electrician sealed a spiderwort in a bottle. The plant is still alive today.
Full details after signup →Detailed Expedition pages — full 8-week curriculum, materials, coverage, showcase outcomes — open after you're on the waitlist.
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