More Than a School: How Hillcrest and Digital Dreamers Build a Future, Together

You know that feeling at the end of the day, when kids come home buzzing with something new they’ve made? Not just a worksheet, but something real they can point to and say, “I built that.” That’s what we tried to achieve this fall at Hillcrest School, and that’s why the work we do there with Digital Dreamers feels so vital.

For us at Digital Dreamers, our mission has always been about creating real-world learning that sparks curiosity and builds confidence. This fall, we found a perfect partner in Hillcrest, a school that asks a powerful, guiding question for the year: “How can we support our students to be flexible, courageous, curious, and capable independent learners, ready to navigate a world we cannot predict?”. To us, that’s not just educational jargon, it’s a rallying cry for the exact skills we want every Oakland kid to have.

A Place Where Curiosity Matters

This fall, we brought in a few different ways for kids to tinker and create at Hillcrest. We set up a kitchen corner where the lesson wasn’t just a recipe, but how to hold a measuring cup without spilling and how to mix things so they actually taste good. Down the hall, kids were huddled around robots made of LEGO, figuring out how to make them turn or stop before hitting a wall. And in another room, it was all about telling stories, but instead of words, they used digital design and animation. The hum in each room wasn’t just noise; it was the sound of kids being deep in thought, trying something, messing up, and trying again.