16 crazy things that happen at Silicon Valley's favorite grade school

Growing up, Max Ventilla never felt like school was for him.

"School was something I did because I was a kid and it was expected of me. That's a real shame," says Ventilla, the former head of personalization at Google. "It's an amazing thing to have this extended period where you work on yourself and have resources to help you grow."

AltSchool, Ventilla's latest venture, sets out to revolutionize that experience by making education more personal.

The Bay Area-based network of "micro-schools" - which raised $100 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year - uses technology to cater the curriculum to each child's needs, and plant the seeds of agency.

I spent the day at AltSchool's Fort Mason location in San Francisco, California, to see its game-changing teaching style in action. Here are the 16 most impressive things I saw.