How EXPLO began as a family idea, grew from a home office, and became a 50-year legacy of learning for its own sake
Before EXPLO was EXPLO, it was just a conversation at the home of Robbie Singal.
Not always at the dinner table. Her parents tried not to talk business there. But the idea was in the house, in the air, in the rhythm of her family life. Her father was working at MIT. Her mother, who had stopped teaching when Robbie and her brother,, Jeff, were young, was thinking about returning to work. Between them, they had the beginnings of something new: teaching experience, business sense, legal knowledge, and a shared belief that learning could feel very different from school.
Robbie was young when the idea began to take shape, but she remembers the feeling of those early conversations.
“They had this idea of just learning for fun,” Robbie says. “It really was just this pure thought.”
That pure thought became EXPLO.
The idea was modeled in part on MIT’s January Term: a four-week “Independent Activities Period” in January between the fall and spring semesters when MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni can teach, take, or organize unusual classes, workshops, forums, projects, contests, performances, tours, and other activities that may not fit into the standard curriculum.
Arnie and Ann imagined EXPLO as a place where young people could explore ideas because they were interesting, not because they were required. It was not summer school or traditional camp. It was a place for kids who wanted to do something different, try new interests, meet surprising people, and follow their curiosity without worrying about grades.
At the time, Robbie says, her parents were not talking about a legacy. The goals were smaller, more practical, more immediate.
“Let’s get to a hundred students,” Robbie remembers.
When they did, the family celebrated. When they reached 300, they celebrated again. The milestones grew. So did the program.
“They hit on something,” Robbie says. “Nothing like this had been done before.”
And now, 50 years later, the thing that started in her family home has reached thousands and thousands of students, staff, families, and friends.
“It’s crazy,” she says. “Just incredible pride. I love talking about it. I love when my friends’ kids go to EXPLO or I bump into someone who mentions it and I get to say ‘Oh, my parents started that.’”
Robbie remembers her father leaving MIT to focus on EXPLO full time.
“He went all of a sudden from being on the road with MIT and leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night to being home all the time,” Robbie says. “It was fantastic.”
The business was in the house. And Robbie and her brother helped.
She remembers building an elaborate mailing system out of LEGOs and wooden blocks in the family room. Marketing materials would go down the chute. Someone would put them in envelopes. Someone else would stamp them. Everyone had a role.
“We had a whole system in our family room,” Robbie says. “We all participated in it. That first couple of years, it was us.”
That early, hands-on family operation reflected something that would remain true about EXPLO: It had structure but also play. It was serious work, but there was room for invention, improvisation, and fun.
Even entertainment for the program became a family endeavor. Robbie remembers going to Faneuil Hall with her family to watch street performers and invite talented ones to come to EXPLO. When Robbie went back with friends on her own, her father would still remind her to look for good acts.
“Like, go up to a juggler and be like, you’re really good, do you want to come perform?” Robbie says, laughing. “It really was a family affair.”
EXPLO’s founding idea came, in part, from what Robbie’s father saw at MIT.
“We used to have MIT students come and live with us,” she says.
They were fun. They were interesting. They woke up at noon and ate cereal. To Robbie, they were a window into a different kind of intellectual life, one that was informal and alive with possibility. Her parents began to imagine what that spirit could look like for younger students.
“My dad was such a camp person,” Robbie says. “He loved camp. He went to camp for a million years, but he was aware that there were a lot of kids who didn’t like camp. And then there were kids who didn’t want summer school. Who wants summer school?”
“One of the things I enjoy is just observing our team and trying to understand the motivations and priorities of the people around me—why they’re doing what they’re doing, why they’re saying what they’re saying,” says Katie.
EXPLO offered another option.
Instead of a “grind” culture that tried to force kids into a “get ahead” mindset, EXPLO encouraged learning just because something caught your attention.
That idea shaped Robbie’s own life, even though she never attended EXPLO as a student. EXPLO’s philosophy was still woven into her life.
“They infused it in the home too, 100%,” Robbie says.
When Robbie was in college, she majored in Slavic studies simply because she found it fascinating. Her parents did not ask the question many parents might have asked: What are you going to do with that?
Instead, they trusted the value of curiosity.
“It was all about: you are in a liberal arts environment,” Robbie says. “You will figure it out. Do something with it.”
Later, as she thought about career paths, her father talked with her thoughtfully about the possibilities. Public health. Psychology. Law. Not because he was pushing her toward prestige.
“It was more just like really thinking deeply about who I am and what’s interesting to me,” Robbie says.
Today, Robbie sees that same instinct in how she talks with her own son, Ezra. When he had two possible job opportunities, she found herself asking: “Which one makes your heart sing? I don’t care where it’s going to take you. It’ll take you somewhere.”
Robbie is clear that her parents were not wild radicals. In many ways, she says, they were traditional. Professional. Thoughtful. Steady. And yet, they built a place where people could stretch. That combination became part of EXPLO’s magic.
“They were not the consummate innovators,” Robbie says. “They were the ones who surrounded themselves with those crazy, wacky, innovative people, and they were the steady ones who kept the ship moving.”
She saw this again and again in the way her parents responded to staff ideas, even when those ideas pushed them outside their own comfort zones. One memory has stayed with her for decades. A staff member once wanted to organize an afternoon activity around flag burning. Robbie does not remember what decision her parents ultimately made. What she remembers is that they did not dismiss the idea instantly.
“They really thought deeply about it,” she says. “Is that okay? Do we allow that? Do we not?”
They considered what students would learn from it, what parents would think, and whether that mattered. The point, for Robbie, is the openness.
“They were able to be stretched by their staff,” she says.
That openness influenced Robbie’s own career. She has worked in a public health startup with big thinkers and fast-moving ideators. Her role, she says, is often to focus the work, keep it on time, keep it on budget, and make the ideas possible.
“I’m the one who just focuses and gets it all done,” she says. “I’m like my parents, 100% that way.”
That is part of the EXPLO story too. Innovation does not happen without imagination. But it also does not happen without trust, steadiness, planning, and care. EXPLO gave wacky ideas a place to live because the structure around them was strong enough to hold them.
As Robbie puts it, the environment was “safe enough to do anything.”
For Robbie, one of the most powerful parts of EXPLO’s legacy is the way her parents created an environment where people could be themselves—before it was common.
She remembers being in the car with her parents as a child while they talked about a staff member who had come out as gay to them. At the time, Robbie says, that was not a mainstream conversation. The staff member had been rejected by family and was afraid to tell Robbie’s parents. Her parents’ response was simple.
“Of course,” Robbie remembers them saying. “How could anybody not still love this person?”
To Robbie, that moment revealed something essential about who they were and what EXPLO became.
“Those kinds of values they just exemplified over and over,” she says. “And I think that also spilled into EXPLO. People could really be whoever they were. Really, truly. My parents meant that.”
She remembers another student, Julie, who had cerebral palsy and attended EXPLO with an aide.
“She was integrated into the program,” Robbie says. “That was very forward back then.”
For middle schoolers especially, that kind of environment can be life changing. It is one thing to tell young people to be themselves. It is another to build a place where they can feel that adults actually mean it. Robbie believes EXPLO did.
“I think it’s life changing for kids,” she says.
And that value has carried into her own parenting.
“My kids are who they are, and we let them be who they are,” she says. “They are not straight up and down typical kids, and it’s just great. I know my parents would love who they’ve become.”
Robbie did not attend EXPLO as a student, but she got to experience the program from a different perspective when her son Ezra went.
“That was the coolest thing,” she says. “It was the most amazing experience to have him go.”
Ezra attended EXPLO first as a day student at Wheaton, then later at Sarah Lawrence and Wellesley. Robbie says he enjoyed the earlier years, but something shifted when he was older and living on campus.
“I think he needed to be just a little bit older,” she says. “He needed to stay there overnight.”
One year, he did not get into the course he originally wanted and ended up placed into something completely random: movie making. That unexpected turn became one of the most important parts of the experience.
“He met these kids, and I felt he finally met his people,” Robbie says. “It just opened his world.”
He has stayed in touch with three friends from the course. He came home energized by the classes he had taken, including one on Neuropsychology and Misdirection. Robbie had grown up believing in EXPLO’s impact. But seeing that spark in her own child was different.
“Very different way to feel it,” she says.
It also brought back one of her own childhood worries in a funny new form. Because Robbie had avoided attending EXPLO partly because she did not want to get in trouble at her parents’ program, she was especially sensitive to the idea of receiving a call about Ezra. One day, she got a message from the dean of students at EXPLO.
“I called my mother,” Robbie says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, Mom.’”
She had heard her mother take so many calls from parents over the years. Now she was the parent.
“It was totally fine,” she says. “But it was funny.”
Another year, she warned Ezra before he left: Whatever you do, no calls from the dean. Then he dyed his hair and stained the bathtub.
“So they called me,” Robbie says.
For Robbie, even those small moments feel connected to the program’s spirit. EXPLO was where kids could stretch, experiment, test boundaries, and discover themselves inside a structure that held them safely. Ezra was a rule follower. A good kid. And still, something about EXPLO gave him space to be a little more himself.
For Robbie’s extended family, EXPLO is more than an organization her parents founded. It is a shared language.
Her cousins Lauren and Michael worked there for years. Many of their closest friends are EXPLO people. When the family gets together, the stories flow: the staff memories, the mischief, the improbable moments, the characters who became part of the family’s mythology.
“I think it totally brings us together,” Robbie says. “It’s a common experience. It’s appreciation for what my parents created.”
That appreciation comes with pride, but also with recognition that EXPLO shaped the people around it, not only the students who attended.
Robbie remembers arriving at college and assuming that all college students would be like EXPLO staff: curious, lively, playful, deeply engaged, a little unconventional. Instead, she found many students who were there to get a degree and move into a profession.
“I felt like I was in a foreign land,” she says.
EXPLO had given her an expectation that people joined learning communities because they loved ideas. They could be funny and serious at once. That expectation stayed with her.
In a world that often asks students to choose the practical path, optimize the outcome, and build toward the next credential, EXPLO’s original idea still feels radical: Learn because you are interested. Try because it might be fun. Take the class that makes your heart sing. Trust that it will take you somewhere.
When Robbie thinks about EXPLO reaching its 50th anniversary, she feels pride about the thousands and thousands of students who have been shaped by an idea that began in her family home. Some went on to become highly visible leaders or innovators. Many more became everyday people who carried some piece of the philosophy into their families, classrooms, workplaces, and communities.
“It’s also all the everyday people who were inspired,” Robbie says. “If they pass any of that philosophy on to their kids or their grandkids, it’s so cool.”
Could her parents have imagined that when they started?
“Not when they started it,” Robbie says.
Their own parents, she thinks, may have thought they were crazy. EXPLO was a risk. Her parents were not natural risk-takers, but they took one anyway. They veered off the traditional path and put their whole hearts into something new.
“They put everything into it,” Robbie says. “It was kind of amazing.”
That may be one of the most beautiful truths of EXPLO at 50. It was founded by people who understood that young people need places to take risks—and who, in creating that place, took a risk themselves.
Fifty years later, Robbie still sees the ripple in the lives of people who learned, somewhere along the way, that curiosity is worth following.