The Story of Portcrash
Who, how, where and why the blithering blobfish, indeed! We can answer all those questions here. Let’s set off right away and meet:
Maike
Maike is the creative mind behind Cap’n Portcrash and her crazy crew of pirates. She’s the one who creates the stories, thinks up the extraordinarily long words and wields the paintbrushes and pens.
But don’t get the idea that Maike has fluff for brains! With twenty years of experience in elementary music pedagogy and instrumental teaching, together with her studies of Art and Music Pedagogy at Bielefeld University, she has a firm foundation for offering you a cool learning system.
Maike founded her own school of Art and Music ten years ago while she was still a student, and teaches children, teens and adults. She and her colleagues have run umpteen projects in preschools and schools at all levels, with everything from small groups to entire schools of up to 400 children.
She has also been teaching music at a secondary school, the Städtisches Gymnasium in Petershagen, for two years. Her father was an elementary school principal, so she’s well versed in formal education systems and knows what’s important to teachers.
Portcrash is her second company, and she runs it parallel to her music school.
The Learning System
A year ago, Maike decided to pour all her accumulated professional experience into a cool learning system for children. She tried it out directly in her courses at preschools and in her music school. She has developed all the products on lean principles, in direct contact with customers, and reacts quickly to feedback.
The design, haptics and audiovisual content Maike has created draw on insights from neuroscience and learning psychology to provide children with a perfect foundation for learning.
She has run split tests on many of the teaching units in the books and optimized or exchanged them on the basis of the results.
Thanks to the interlinked digital and analog contents, „Rock the Boat with Cap’n Portcrash®“ offers a state-of-the-art learning experience, without losing sight of the most important aspects of the learning process. The emotional attachment to the well-rounded characters makes learning easy, and the gamification elements add plenty of fun to the learning system.
By means of emotional, informal and somatic learning, children are able to grasp even quite demanding content with ease. The learning process involves plenty of movement and stories, all with the comforting reassurance that it’s fine to just try things out, rather than simply being confronted with all the material that has to be learnt.
Cap’n Portcrash
Maike invented the character Cap’n Portcrash in a Creative Writing seminar while majoring in English at college. Since then, the two have been inseparable. Maike now calculates everything in hamster units, and Cap’n Portcrash has already taken to the stage in a mini musical!
Cap’n Portcrash, they say, may have got her name because (through a string of unfortunate circumtances) on the very day of her coxwain exam, Maike steered the port side of a coxed four rowing boat against a really really huge, really really green buoy, and may have flunked the exam as a result. But of course, that’s just a rumor.
In the final exam of her minor subject at university, Art and Music Pedagogy, Maike presented the story of Rescue Island and Barbecue Day for the first time in an animated cartoon film she’d made as her exam piece.
So you see, we’re not exaggerating when we say Cap’n Portcrash has been all over the place already.
