Inside Alpha High School Austin - Exclusive Tour with Nate Zamaites | #rehanallahwala

So I'm finally at the Alpha School in Austin. Thank you, Nate, for the small presentation tour of Alpha. It looks pretty cool because it's not a traditional high school, but it is still just a building. What makes it special is going to be our AI learning. So students are only spending about two to three hours in the morning on academics, completely guided by AI. and then after that So this is our Pomodoro timer If you read in the studies, there are certain session blocks that Just optimize how we work as human beings. So that's typically would be like a 53 14 minute break So you work for 53 minutes you take a 14 minute break. That's my understanding of Pomodoro I believe we're doing an hour 15 and 7 minutes break. How many students do you have here? I believe Approximately. Can we see the rooms there like the quiet rooms? This is your office? So this is one of the pods? of the time the majority of their day is spent talking to these specialists This is where we going to have a breakdown of our day what progress students have made on their masterpiece who they spoken to what plans they made We have a dirt bike about 40 minutes east of Austin a dirt bike park for a nonprofit So that gentleman I can recall his name because I wasn here at the time but he would break down a lot over there from what I heard just because he was meeting with so many people in the towns over there to get that constructed. So this would be the... So you said there are 100 students already? It's 50 to 100. 50 to 100. We're growing. We just had like three students yesterday. And when can you join in? Anytime. We work with anybody at their level. So is it age bound or is it class? Like if I have not, so I am 50. Can I join? In theory, no. It would be K through 12. So this is going to be our Pomodoro room, essentially where our high schoolers are going to be working. And then above us up here. I can't go up there because there are folks working. We call it our rocket ship program, and we have this for our middle school, our elementary school, and our high schoolers. Essentially, these are those folks who are really self-driven, and they're working through all their advanced courses. How do you think of an AP class or a pre-AP class? What's an AP? Advanced placement here in the States. An AP test is what students take so they can get college credit while in high school. but in traditional high school AP classes are harder. Students here, they go to the rocket ship of their own will and it's generally because they're working at home, getting through all their academics and they can practice and put a lot of time on their masterpieces, which really trains them in financial literacy, how to manage a project Right here is gonna be L3 This is our new What an L3 L3 it just what we refer to our middle school as It's just a term. So this is middle school going on? This is our middle school right now. So fifth grade, fourth grade, third grade? Exactly. So it's going to be our K through fourth grade is going to be up north in Round Rock. And that's just going to be our elementary school. This is going to be 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th. And then 9th through 12th. What are they doing? Right here. It looks like they're going through the schedule because we're approaching the end of the day. And it ends at 3.30 p.m.? At 3.30, 4 o'clock. A lot of students do stay later. Like I said, they're— Even later than 4? Oh, yeah, absolutely. They love it so much? Well, yeah, and what makes it so special for the students is that Masterpiece program. I think what's a masterpiece for like the alpha x so what is the alpha x alpha x is our masterpiece program where students are helped by their guys to pursue something of their passion a lot of students we have one student has 1.8 million followers on tiktok she so that's her masterpiece is becoming an influencer she talks about this school along with some other stuff other students will pursue influencing in the gaming industry we have a student her name is sonia she's working on a pretty game-changing innovation for stuffed animals. I don't even wanna say it because it's good, but you can speak to her afterwards. So everyone here gets to choose what they wanna do in terms of that masterpiece project The guide job like Jelan up there on stage is to motivate them and then teach them along the way how they going to do that Because most students upon leaving high school or leaving college you kind of just have to find your own way and figure out how am I going to start this venture that I came up with in my head? How am I going to manage this project? Or am I even going to start a project because I don't have the skills? How do they decide if they're in fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade? So that comes in with our AI program, which we made ourselves through Trilogy. And you just take a diagnostic test. It lets you know, right? Shas? Yeah. Like, how do you determine whether or not someone's an editor? So it's a rostering program. How's it going? I'm Shas. Hi, Shas. I'm Rehan. What's your name? Rehan. Rehan. Great to meet you. I'm Shas. I'm visiting from Pakistan. Oh, perfect, perfect. So welcome in. Basically, what we do is we do a rostering program. So our students, they start at a bottom-up level, right? We want to motivate them to learn. And so the way that we motivate them to learn is by starting at a grade level that's actually lower than their original grade level. It does two things, right? First, it allows them to be motivated to learn because they, say they're a 6th grader, right? They started a 3rd grade test and they get a 100. When they get a 100, they're super motivated because they're doing a perfect score on a standardized test. And then they work their way up to the next one at 4. And then they work their way up to the next one at 4. Six. Let's say that six, they fall somewhere between 60% to 80%. If they fall between 60% to 80%, that means that they know some of the skill plan, but not all of it. So you get knowledge gap skills. If they score below 60%, then you beginning of that grade and that's the grade that you roster in so the reason we do that is to make sure that we fill in any holes that were fundamentally lost in public school right if you get 70 percent passing first second third fourth fifth sixth grade by the time you're in middle school 30 of a lot of that's a lot of stuff you don't know and so we make sure that we fill in all those holes i could take a time before we start building mastery and hiring awesome awesome I'm going to go grab a co-worker of mine, and I'll be back here in a second. How do you say your full name? I'll LinkedIn you. It's Shas, S-H-A-A-S. My full name is Shashwit, but I go by Shas. How do I find you on LinkedIn? My name is Shas, S-H-A-A-S. You'll find me, big alphabet. And last name? Singh, S-I-N-G-H. Let's hear it, RJ. Awesome. Thank you. I'll be right back. So he's been here for a couple of years. He knows a lot more about it than I do, and I'm still learning. But it truly is incredible. And at the front, I don't know if you saw, but our metrics of our SAT scores having a minimum average of 14.10 is pretty incredible compared to the fact that most of the Texas schools are trying to break 1,000. Cool. So that's our L3. And then right here is going to be that rocket ship room for our middle schoolers. What's a rocket ship room? So a rocket ship, as I mentioned, for high schoolers. This is for those particularly motivated students who are advanced in their classes and dedicating a lot of time to their masterpiece. So they get their own space to work on that It just another hangout room Essentially But a lot of the time kids just need a quiet space so they can focus or many times they have Zoom meetings or calls with specialists and beyond this is just utility over here. Kitchen and everything. So they bring their own lunch? No, we have our own lunch. We have a company, I can't recall the name at the moment, they come in and they cater us. Okay, cool. All organic. That summarizes the tour. Do you guys have any questions? What's the tuition fees? The fees, I believe it's $40,000 a year of tuition, and we also have finance plans beyond that. Does that include food? That includes food as well. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Can I get admission? Yeah, I asked the same question too. I was jealous. I was like, come on, guys. and that's your education you have like this is a school high school uh this is a high school and a middle school our elementary school for the younger kids are up in round rock we actually have a gt um mgt georgetown gifted and talented is a program we have in texas and for lack of better terms it's not necessarily the most advanced of programs it's not working as well as it should. So we're actually developing our own gifted talent for our students and having a location in Georgetown and that's just starting. Georgetown DC or Georgetown Texas? Georgetown, Texas. All right, amazing.