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Founded 2023 · Westfield, NJ
It started in a school STEM club. Two volunteers noticed that children given real materials and a real problem behaved completely differently from children given a worksheet. So they built somewhere that only did the first thing.
Why we exist
Exploratores was founded in 2023, inspired by what we saw volunteering at a local elementary school’s STEM club. The students’ curiosity and excitement made the case on its own: there needed to be more places where school-aged children could actually explore this.
So we wrote a curriculum that keeps a solid foundation in STEM concepts (real physics, real engineering, taught properly) and attaches every one of them to something the child builds with their hands.
Our mission is an encouraging, genuinely fun room that fosters a love of science, engineering and tinkering; that enriches a child’s education rather than duplicating it; and that leaves them wanting to find out how the next thing works.
Who teaches
Three people who did the work before they taught it.
Founder & Instructor
A licensed clinical psychologist in New Jersey and New York. Iskra designs how the room feels: warm, unhurried, and set up so that a child who gets something wrong in front of eleven others still wants to try the next thing. The psychology of how children learn to enjoy difficulty is the part of this she is expert in.
Program Developer & Instructor
Ph.D. in Particle Physics from MIT. Boris competed in and then organised physics olympiads at school, and has been building the same kind of opportunity for children ever since. He wrote the Exploratores curriculum, and that is why the lessons contain real physics rather than a demonstration of it.
Instructor
Master’s in Mechanical Engineering with a robotics concentration from Northeastern. Sofia worked as a toy engineer at Hasbro, which is an unusually good preparation for teaching children to design things. She has spent years working out what a seven-year-old can actually build and enjoy.
These three cards need real portraits of Iskra, Boris and Sofia. Project photographs are standing in because the live site has no instructor pictures at all. For a business asking parents to leave a child in a room, that is one of the more expensive things missing from it.
The space
A bright, purpose-fitted floor above the shops on Broad Street, four minutes from Westfield station. Long worktables so nobody is fighting for bench space, a project shelf where finished builds go on display, a screen for the lesson and a makerspace corner stocked with materials.
In the press
The ribbon-cutting on East Broad Street, with the Westfield business community and a room full of families.
Coverage of a new hands-on science and engineering centre opening in downtown Westfield.
What the founders set out to build, and what the first families made of it.
A single try-out lesson costs $65 and tells you more than any page can.
