Experience designer, Education futurist, Hummus enthusiast
Two days before launching a falafel truck with his best friend, Ariel hastily chose to join Teach for America and left his life in the Bay Area for adventures in the Bayou State. With dreams of working in the food industry put on pause, he turned his attention to teaching math to a rambunctious crew of middle schoolers in St. Bernard Parish. They taught him Zydeco dance moves and how to eat crawfish; he taught them fractions and algebra using a game or two.
The Bayou adventure led Ariel to Chicago, where he helped open a charter school in the South Side. Equipped with more chromebooks and iPads than hands to carry them, Ariel was curious to come up with ways to get the most out of the latest and greatest technological tools. That led him to the Stanford School of Education, where he studied Learning, Design & Technology. While there he develop a project called iCanGo, a story building tool for parents of children who are on the Autism spectrum.
Through an internship with the K12 Lab Network, Ariel’s was inspired to explore the intersection of design thinking in K12 education. As a Head of Learning Collaborations for the Stanford d.school, he now spends countless hours dreaming up ways to inspire learners to engage in creative work.