The Nomizo Method

Preparing You for Life, Not Just the Exam

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The Nomizo Method Uses Active Learning to Grow Your Powers

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The Story Behind the Method

Nomizo’s founder was an average high school student because he wasn’t inspired by the curriculum. It wasn’t that Jonathan lacked interest in learning, but traditional schooling just didn’t provide the challenges his brain sought. Fortunately, Jonathan received deep intellectual stimulation outside of his K-12 schooling, and in facing these strategic and analytical challenges he also developed the rigor and discipline he’d need for life. Jonathan would go on to graduate college Phi Beta Kappa, manage his own investment firm before reaching 30, and do something most people thought was impossible; he built and ran a school in Somaliland, Africa that has now matriculated over 200 students to top institutions globally, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, and UPenn. Here’s the 60 Minutes piece Anderson Cooper did on the story 

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While there were dozens of students with higher grades in high school, decades later it was Jonathan standing on the podium giving the commencement address. Jonathan is but one example of the countless folks who thrived in life without always being a great student. This divergence goes the other direction as well – great students can struggle in the post-academic world.

Nomizo Powers You Up for Life Success

The Nomizo Method is a highly engaging curriculum to develop those critical life skills that are underrepresented in traditional schooling. Nomizo is a systematic way to bring all kids the challenges that Jonathan and others were lucky enough to receive informally.

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Engaging With Complexity

Life involves constant judgements, large and small, with imperfect information and no right answers. Whether it is in your career, your family, or with your friends, you have to learn to make sense of complex problems to make wise decisions. Nomizo’s curriculum teaches students to embrace complexity and give it order. Nomizo teaches students how to think so they are prepared for a world that demands it.

Nomizo Strategy & Tactics

Strategic, Tactical, and Analytical Nuance

We live in a dynamic world in which problems do not stand still.  Whether in business or personal matters, the challenge we faced last month can now take on a very different form. A dynamic world requires dynamic thinking, so Nomizo’s curriculum faces students off against moving targets, rather than the static learning pervasive in traditional schooling. Nomizo trains students to think strategically while adjusting their tactics to the situation.

Nomizo Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal Analysis, Communication, and Persuasion

It is nearly impossible to live a fulfilling life without learning to successfully engage with others. Likewise, the better our interpersonal skills the more we can accomplish. In traditional schools one can become an ‘A Student’ without developing emotional intelligence, social skills, and verbal persuasion. The Nomizo Method fills that gap and more, pushing students to collaborate, empathize, communicate, and convince each other.

The Nomizo Method develops these Power Realms through our 4 activity types:

4 activity types

Questions At A Glance

What's with all the board games?
  • Highly Social: Nomizo’s board game curriculum drives healthy and positive in-person interactions. Whether collaborating to defeat a global pandemic, identifying who among them is the murderer, or forming an alliance with France to invade Germany, Nomizo’s students can enjoy a screen-free opportunity to connect with peers. 
  • Visual Learning: Done properly, board games bring educational concepts to life. From a young child visually counting out her piece’s movement to a teenager playing a side in the Afghanistan War, board games can lead to deeper understanding.
  • Fun: Who wouldn’t rather learn by playing a game? So much of learning is about focus and dedication, which many students do not feel in traditional classroom and tutoring settings. Since students like to play board games, and almost everyone likes to win, the focus comes naturally.
Why not focus on mastering a particular game, like chess, instead of working with a wider range of games?

The Nomizo Method views games as fun and engaging tools for developing real life skills, not as ends in themselves. Each individual game, even a wonderfully rich one like chess, focuses on particular skills, without necessarily developing a broad range. Therefore, mastering just one game, no matter to what degree, leaves a student deficient in far too many areas. As an example, the greatest chess players in the world have zero interpersonal skills because they are literally computers. Deep Blue may have known every possible chess opening, but it hadn’t any idea how to speak to coworkers or argue a point.

Will Nomizo also help my child with school?

Nomizo is very different from traditional tutoring, which might prove to be exactly what your child needs. Albert Einstein is often attributed with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So if your child is struggling with school then why should more school and more worksheets be the solution? 

Nomizo’s curriculum has a few key benefits to assist your child’s schooling: 

  1. Visual Learning: Nomizo’s learning is highly visual, allowing your child to engage with the materials.
  2. Less Frustration: Nomizo evaluates your child’s mastery level to place him or her in activities that will challenge them to take an attainable next step. By adapting to the child’s existing level we avoid putting them in impossible situations that only lead to frustration.
  3. Inspiration: As students gain confidence with Nomizo’s various challenges they’ll have an incentive to make sure their key school fundamentals keep up. For example, a student wanting to take on higher level strategic games may find their math to be a limiting factor. Suddenly they have a reason to learn it other than their parents or teacher telling them to do so. “Necessity is the mother of innovation.”   

For those students excelling in school, Nomizo can help prepare them for success in higher education. Nomizo’s Rigorous Investigations require the same type of analysis and information finding used in liberal arts courses.

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A Nomizo Perspective

Parents so often think of traditional K-12 schooling as an end in itself, rather than a tool for life success.  ‘A’ Students” are generally the ones who focus in class, diligently do all their homework, prepare for exams well in advance, and write with exquisite grammar. These are great skills that transition well to the rest of life, where focus, diligence, preparation, and written communication are indeed important. But school isn’t the only way to develop academic skills, as Jonathan and others have so clearly proved. What’s more, traditional schooling does not focus on many critical skills for life success. You can ace school and still not be ready for the world.

 

Nomizo Board Games