Synthesis

Synthesis is the cohort-based decision-making program that came out of SpaceX's Ad Astra school, now a stand-alone subscription product. It is unusual in the homeschool market, premium-priced, simulation-driven, and designed as a supplement rather than a core curriculum.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Unit studies, online live class, simulation-based
Worldview	Secular
Grades	3-5, 6-8, 9-12 (Synthesis Teams: ages 7-18)
Formats	Online live class, digital (Synthesis Tutor: AI math, ages 5-11)
Cost tier	Premium
Parent intensity	1
ESA-common	Sometimes (premium subscription, varies by state)
Accredited	No
Established	2020
Website	synthesis.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	4	Genuine cognitive challenge; not coverage of conventional content
Ease of teaching	5	Fully facilitated; parent has no instructional role
Content quality	4	Distinctive simulation experience; little equivalent in market
Flexibility	3	Cohort schedule is fixed; cohort-week pacing required
Value for money	2	Premium pricing; high cost relative to subject coverage
Worldview scope	5	Secular; works across all worldview backgrounds
Visual/design	4	Polished platform; intentional product-design aesthetic
Support resources	4	Active facilitation, parent-side dashboard, community

Who the publisher is

Synthesis was founded in 2020 by Josh Dahn and Chrisman Frank. Dahn was the co-founder and lead teacher of Ad Astra, the small experimental school Elon Musk started for the children of SpaceX employees in 2014, where Dahn developed a pedagogy organized around collaborative simulations and decision-making exercises rather than standard subject blocks. Frank had previously co-founded an education-technology startup and brought the product and platform expertise. Together, they built Synthesis as a way to take Dahn's simulation-driven approach out of Ad Astra's tiny student body and make it available to children outside the SpaceX orbit.

The original Synthesis product, now branded Synthesis Teams, is a weekly cohort class. Students ages seven through eighteen are placed in age-appropriate teams of 6-10 students, meet for one-hour live online sessions weekly, and work through collaborative simulations: economic strategy games, geopolitical decision exercises, resource-allocation puzzles. A trained facilitator runs each session, and the simulations are designed by Synthesis's curriculum team to surface specific decision-making and group-dynamics lessons.

In 2023 the company launched a second product, Synthesis Tutor, an AI-powered adaptive math tutor for ages five through eleven, built on top of large language model infrastructure. Synthesis Tutor is a separate subscription from Synthesis Teams and addresses a different need: math practice and tutoring, delivered conversationally through an AI agent. The two products share branding but are functionally distinct.

Synthesis is secular and worldview-neutral. The simulations focus on logic, strategy, and group decision-making; the math tutor focuses on math. Neither product carries religious content, ideological framing, or political content. This positions Synthesis as broadly usable across homeschool families regardless of worldview.

The core pedagogy

Synthesis Teams is built on the simulation-as-curriculum premise: students learn decision-making, collaboration, strategic thinking, and managing-complexity skills by playing in carefully designed multi-player scenarios that surface those skills as the path to winning the game. There is no lecture, no textbook reading, and no homework. Each weekly session is the curriculum.

The simulations rotate. A given semester might include scenarios where students manage a fictional country's economy, allocate scarce resources across competing priorities, negotiate trade with rival teams, or coordinate to solve a logic puzzle that requires group strategy. The Synthesis curriculum team designs these scenarios to produce specific cognitive and social challenges; facilitators are trained to surface the lessons after each session in a debrief. Across multiple weeks, students develop the kind of strategic reasoning and group-dynamics literacy that is otherwise difficult to teach explicitly.

Synthesis Tutor (the math product) operates on a different premise: conversational AI tutoring for ages five through eleven. The student talks (or types) with the AI tutor, which adapts its explanations, examples, and practice problems to the student's responses. The math content scope covers basic numeracy through pre-algebra topics; the differentiator is the conversational format and the responsiveness of the adaptive tutoring loop.

Signature mechanics: (1) Weekly live cohort sessions. Synthesis Teams meets one hour per week with a facilitator. (2) Designed multi-player simulations, proprietary scenarios built to teach specific decision-making skills. (3) Adaptive AI math tutoring. Synthesis Tutor delivers personalized conversational practice. (4) Premium subscription model, both products are priced significantly above conventional homeschool subjects.

A day in the life

A 12-year-old student enrolled in Synthesis Teams logs into the platform once a week at the cohort's appointed time, typically 60-90 minutes, scheduled after consideration of the cohort members' time zones. The session opens with a brief facilitator introduction, the team enters the week's simulation (perhaps a multi-team trade negotiation or an island-survival resource allocation scenario), and they spend 40-60 minutes playing it out. The facilitator pauses for debriefs, asks pointed questions about decisions made, and surfaces the cognitive and group-dynamics lessons embedded in the design. After the session, students typically have no homework; the next week, the cohort meets again with a new simulation.

Outside Synthesis Teams, the student's homeschool day proceeds independently, math, language arts, science, history, and any other subjects run through whatever the family's primary curriculum is. Synthesis is explicitly a supplement, not a replacement.

A 7-year-old using Synthesis Tutor (the AI math product) opens the platform for 15-25 minutes of math practice, talks or types with the AI tutor through the day's problems, and ends the session. The interaction adapts based on what the student finds difficult; the parent sees a dashboard summary afterward. This is functionally a personalized math-tutoring product, with the conversational interface and responsiveness as the product's differentiator.

What they do exceptionally well

Decision-making and group-dynamics learning. This is Synthesis Teams's signature. The simulations are genuinely well-designed, they put students in cognitive situations that surface real strategic and social challenges, and the debriefs help students name what they just experienced. Skills like "recognize when consensus is being faked," "allocate attention under uncertainty," and "negotiate with someone whose objectives partially conflict with yours" are difficult to teach through lecture or textbook; Synthesis is one of very few homeschool-accessible programs that teaches them at all.

Production quality and platform polish. Synthesis is built by a team that came out of SpaceX-adjacent and ed-tech-startup contexts, and the platform shows it. Onboarding is smooth, the simulations run reliably, the parent dashboard is informative, and the facilitator pool is professional. Few homeschool products at this price point match the operational polish.

Genuine challenge. The simulations are not gentle. Students who join Synthesis Teams typically report that the early sessions are cognitively demanding, sometimes uncomfortably so, in ways their conventional curricula do not produce. Families looking to stretch a high-capability student often find Synthesis fills a gap that no curriculum-in-a-box can.

No parent involvement required. Once enrolled, the student attends the weekly session independently. Parents are not facilitating, teaching, or grading. For families running multiple subjects across multiple children, this hands-off structure is genuinely valuable.

What they do poorly

Cost relative to coverage. This is Synthesis's structural critique. Synthesis Teams pricing as of April 2026 is approximately $50-$70 per week for the cohort subscription, depending on tier, roughly $2,000-$3,500 per academic year for one student, for one hour of cohort time per week. For families on a budget, this cost is hard to justify against the breadth of subjects a comparable spend could cover (Outschool classes, Beast Academy math, multiple textbook curricula).

Not a curriculum substitute. Synthesis explicitly does not replace math, language arts, science, or history. Families enrolling expect a supplement and budget accordingly; families looking to consolidate spending into fewer programs are often disappointed.

Cohort schedule constrains pacing. The weekly live cohort meets at a fixed time and proceeds at the cohort's pace. Families who travel, who run irregular schedules, or whose students prefer self-paced study find the cohort model frustrating. Missing sessions reduces the value disproportionately, since the simulations are collaborative.

Limited evidence base. Synthesis is young, founded 2020, and its long-term outcomes for students are not yet documented in the way that decades-old curricula's outcomes are. Families enrolling are betting on the pedagogy and the team's track record at Ad Astra, not on a long base of homeschool outcomes data.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Synthesis if: you have a high-capability student who is unstretched by conventional homeschool curricula; you have the budget for a premium supplement on top of your core curriculum spend; you value decision-making and group-dynamics learning; your student can commit to the weekly cohort schedule; you are comfortable that Synthesis is supplementary rather than core.

• Skip Synthesis if: you are looking for a complete or core curriculum (Synthesis is supplementary); your homeschool budget cannot absorb a premium supplement; your family schedule cannot accommodate a fixed weekly cohort time; you prefer self-paced over live-cohort delivery; you want a longer track record before committing.

Cost honest assessment

Synthesis Teams pricing as of April 2026 runs approximately $200-$300 per month for the cohort subscription, depending on tier and any bundled features. Across a typical 9-10 month academic year, this works out to $2,000-$3,500 per student. Synthesis Tutor (the math product) is priced separately, typically in the $30-$50 per month range, or roughly $300-$500 per academic year.

Compared to Outschool live cohort classes (typically $15-$40 per session, or $150-$400 per semester for a multi-week class), Synthesis is meaningfully more expensive on a per-hour basis. The cost differential reflects Synthesis's proprietary simulation curriculum and facilitator training; whether this premium is justified depends on the family's valuation of the simulation pedagogy versus the broader Outschool live-class market.

A realistic all-in cost for a family enrolling one student in Synthesis Teams across an academic year: $2,200-$3,500. For a family layering Synthesis Tutor on top: add $300-$500. This places Synthesis in the same per-student cost band as some private microschools, while delivering only a single weekly session.

ESA eligibility notes

Synthesis ESA eligibility varies by state. Some marketplaces (Arizona's ClassWallet in particular) have approved Synthesis for premium subscription enrichment categories; others have not yet listed Synthesis as an approved vendor. The premium subscription and live-cohort format places Synthesis in the same ESA category as other live-class providers (Outschool, Veritas Press Scholars Online); families should verify their specific state's policy on synchronous online learning subscriptions before enrolling. Synthesis Tutor's AI-tutoring format is sometimes treated differently from Synthesis Teams's cohort format under state ESA rules; verify both separately if both are intended.

Alternatives

• Outschool, a family would choose Outschool over Synthesis because Outschool offers thousands of live-cohort classes across virtually every subject at a wide range of price points, including strategy, simulation, and game-based classes that approximate parts of the Synthesis experience at lower per-class cost.
• Beast Academy / Art of Problem Solving, a family would choose AoPS over Synthesis because AoPS delivers genuinely demanding cognitive challenge in mathematics through self-paced and live courses, at lower per-student cost and with deeper subject mastery than Synthesis's general decision-making focus.
• Khan Academy + Parent-led discussion, a family would choose this over Synthesis because Khan Academy is free and a thoughtful parent can build the kind of decision-making and discussion-rich learning experience Synthesis offers, at the cost of substantial parent time and design effort that Synthesis abstracts away.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Synthesis Teams product page, the Synthesis Tutor product page, the About / founders biography, and pricing pages on the Synthesis site. We cross-referenced against the Ad Astra school history for context on the pedagogical roots and reviewed competitive pricing on Outschool and Art of Problem Solving for comparison. Prices and program details verified April 2026.