Enrichment and Gifted Education since 2007

Interactive education, using every tool available — from myself to technology to the natural world.

• Winner, National Competition for Ecological and Biological Teaching Materials (2012)
• Supervisor of the national winner, Young Environmental Researchers Competition (2012)
• Supervisor of national winners, National Ecology Olympiad (2016, 2017)
• Member of the team of teachers who trained the gold medalist of the IBO (2012)

• B.S. in Biology — GPA: 3.7
• M.S. in Biology (Microbiology) — GPA: 4.0
• Ph.D. in Education

When I was a kid, science seemed like a bunch of boring formulas in a textbook. Oh, how many simple and amazing things I only came to understand much later! Physics is a ball flying through the air and your reflection in a mirror. Chemistry is in a princess’s crown and the salt shaker on the table. Biology is even in the reason we, with our furry primate roots, love hugging big fuzzy teddy bears and listening to professors with magnificent heads of gray hair.

I started out as a biologist, but one day I was invited to run a microbiology club for curious kids, and that was it. I was hooked. Teaching turned out to be endlessly interesting and far more complicated than I had imagined.

I quickly learned one thing: if you scatter all the treasures of science at children’s feet, they tend to jump out of the way. But if you grab those treasures, tuck them under your arm, and start running, kids will chase after you with enormous enthusiasm, treating every fact they catch as a trophy they earned themselves.

To me, teaching is exactly that delicate balance: knowing what to explain outright, what to hide inside a puzzle, when to step into the background, and when to give just the tiniest nudge. Lesson by lesson, I kept notes on how my students reacted and refined my materials, trying to find that sweet spot between real scientific depth and the desire to keep going.

That is how Nature Online slowly began to take shape and grow.

Everything you’ll find here is the result of thousands of hours of work: creating the lessons themselves, trying them out with students, watching what interested them, where they struggled, what they were ready for, and listening to the endless stream of questions they asked.

I hope these materials help make your own lessons more interesting and save you a little time along the way.