How the early days of EXPLO became a proving ground for Brian Hughes and Scott Traylor—and their belief in transformative learning.
“EXPLO doesn’t ‘fill a pail.’ It lights a fire.”
— Scott Traylor
What if learning wasn’t something students had to do—but something they helped create?
The origin of EXPLO started with this core question, and with a small, scrappy team.
Brian Hughes was a member of that initial team. Now an established entrepreneur, educator, chairman and director of R&D for Insolia, and chair of the Academic Affairs Committee for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Corporation, in 1976, Brian was just a student at MIT when his advisor and JV basketball coach came to him for a favor: help get a new educational startup off the ground. This advisor, Arnie Singal, was starting a new education program with his wife, Anne, based partially on the Independent Activities Period (IAP) program at MIT, where students engaged in self-directed, independent, and focused learning over a period of four weeks.
Brian, who had his sights set on going to business school after MIT, thought, “You know, if I helped with the startup, maybe I could get experience and that would help me get into B school.”
That, he did. He also had his “first lesson in sales” as he worked on promoting the program, a crash course in logistics as he arranged the program’s transportation contract, and even a stint in HR as he helped hire and onboard new staff members.
After that summer in 1977, he enrolled in Harvard Business School. “Frankly, after I walked away from EXPLO, I thought, I’m done now.”
But Brian’s first summer with EXPLO wasn’t the end of the story.
Scott Traylor’s EXPLO origins have echoes of Brian’s, though Scott was first exposed to the experience as a student of the program. In fact, he loved EXPLO’s campus experience so much, he found himself counting down the days until he could return. So, when a serendipitous encounter with Arnie in their shared hometown led to a part-time job out of the founders’ home, Scott was thrilled.
Looking back, Scott describes that time as sitting on the ground floor of an education revolution, one that has now lasted 50 years. And Scott was on the ground literally, too, as his early jobs included stuffing envelopes on Arnie and Anne’s living room floor.
“It was my first startup experience,” says Scott, “which I didn’t realize until I was much older . . . it has definitely shaped who I am and what I do.”
Scott is an Emmy-winning EdTech product executive and chair of the Education Advisory Board of Lingokids, as well as a strategic consultant for kids products, kids apps, product innovation, and UI/UX. He is also the board chair for EXPLO.
“I formed my business around this idea that if I was going to make learning products for children . . . it’s fun first, learning second. If it’s not fun first, learning will never happen,” says Scott, adding that this philosophy is one he learned at EXPLO.
Similarly, as an MIT trustee, Brian has carried EXPLO’s lessons back to his alma mater. He actively advocated for the power of “carefully curated” and “transformative” learning environments, using EXPLO as an “existence proof” to influence MIT initiatives in Open Learning, such as educational boot camps and the MicroMasters program.
At EXPLO, curiosity doesn’t begin with a syllabus; it begins with people. From the very start, Brian recalls instructors, often college students, being given a powerful prompt: “Think back to the teacher who changed your life, the one who made learning feel alive, and then become that person for someone else.”
That philosophy shaped everything. Courses weren’t designed to check boxes; they were expressions of genuine passion. A student might encounter nuclear engineering alongside a class on extrasensory perception or learn advanced mathematics from someone who also taught unicycling. The goal wasn’t polish; it was ignition. When students saw adults deeply engaged in ideas, they began to see learning not as something assigned but as something worth pursuing.
Just as important, EXPLO gives students ownership of that pursuit. For many, it can be the first time learning feels truly theirs.
Scott remembers the freedom vividly: the ability to choose subjects, explore interests, and engage in topics that traditional schools simply didn’t offer. That autonomy wasn’t incidental; it was essential.
In that environment where passion is visible and choice is real, curiosity takes root quickly. But what makes EXPLO remarkable is that it doesn’t fade when the summer ends. Students return home changed, often in ways that surprise even their families.
Brian describes parents asking, “Who is this child you’ve sent back to me?” It’s the emergence of confidence, identity, and a sense of possibility.
That’s the ripple effect of curiosity. A single moment of being seen, inspired, or challenged can alter how a student understands themselves and their future.
“One of the things we did at EXPLO that was extraordinarily powerful was creating this curated environment that was transformative,” says Brian.
EXPLO summers are full of those magic, sparky moments. Brian describes one unforgettable morning from his time as an EXPLO board member, when a new Harry Potter release had students buzzing with excitement. The staff transformed their daily breakfast into something magical. When students walked into the dining hall, they found candles suspended from the ceiling, an unmistakable nod to Hogwarts. There was no announcement, no lesson attached, just a quiet, immersive gesture that said: We see what excites you, and it matters here.
“I would learn best from a teacher who connected with me,” says Brian, “and I’d learn even better if I connected with the students who were around me. And we’re doing it together.” That’s what EXPLO does.
In moments like the Harry Potter breakfast, students weren’t just participants in a program; they felt understood and included. It’s this kind of intentional, imaginative experience that lowers barriers and builds connection. It’s reflective of the ethos Scott described: “If it’s not fun first . . . if you don’t have the curiosity and the interest . . . learning will never occur.”
As Scott reflects on his time as a student at EXPLO and then young staffer, he attributes some of that energy and environment of shared experience to the culture of listening that was created by Anne and Arnie.
“Anne and Arnie, you know, they always did speak with the students,” he says. “In the early days, they were both avid runners. They would gather every day, to lead a group of jogging students around the lake. Eventually it became biking, and they biked right up to the very end.”
Their goal? To build community with students.
Today, Scott says, “if a parent or a student writes EXPLO, we take it pretty seriously, and oftentimes we get some great ideas that are written in.”
“I know that when I’m visiting a campus, oftentimes we arrange to have students come to speak with us and just to hear what their experience is and what they think,” he adds. That is the culture, the style of leadership Anne and Arnie created.
Decades after helping launch EXPLO, Brian Hughes returned to the program, this time as a parent searching for possibility.
His son Richard had been diagnosed on the autistic spectrum at a time when the understanding of the condition was still evolving. Unsure of what kind of environment would support him, Brian reached back to the place he had helped build.
“I called up Arnie and said, look, here’s my son’s situation. Do you think he could survive it? He said: ‘Well, why don’t we try it?’”
That openness, the willingness to meet students where they are, was core to EXPLO from the beginning, and it touched Brian to experience it now as a parent.
He and his son relocated from San Antonio to Cambridge for the summer, arranging a house-sitting stay so Richard could attend as a day student. What began as an experiment quickly became something more. The following summer, Richard chose to return, this time as a residential student. He thrived at EXPLO summer after summer, eventually going on to graduate from MIT.
Soon after, Brian’s younger son, Neil, joined as well. Immersed in an environment that valued curiosity over convention, Neil thrived. The experience accelerated his confidence and academic trajectory so significantly that he chose to enter an early college program two years ahead of schedule after returning from EXPLO.
It was during this chapter that Brian was invited back once more, this time to help guide EXPLO’s future as a member of its board.
For Scott, EXPLO’s impact came full circle in a different way, through the lens of mentorship and legacy. He invited Arnie, whom he lists among his lifelong mentors, to his own successful educational media office to show him what he had built, a testament in a way to Arnie’s influence on his life.
“There was a moment before he asked me if I would consider joining to be a trustee,” says Scott. “I forget what we were talking about, but it was about learning, about kids and teenagers . . . and I had kind of just offhandedly said the phrase, ‘You know, it’s not the filling of a pail, it’s the lighting of a fire.’ [W.B. Yeats] And I remember everyone in the room looking at each other at that moment. Shortly after that conversation, Arnie had asked me to join the board.”
The connection was clear in that room. The same idea that had shaped EXPLO from the beginning, the belief that education should ignite curiosity and that student-driven learning was the key to success, was now guiding Scott’s own work.
His invitation to join the board wasn’t just a professional milestone; it was recognition that the spark had carried forward.
Now serving as the board chair, Scott views his ongoing role as a vital way to preserve the “voice of the student” in the boardroom.
Brian, who played a key role in steering the program through Arnie’s retirement transition, says he realizes that the temporary summer internship has become his “best startup,” ultimately impacting tens of thousands of kids, including his own.
Both men entered EXPLO without much thought about how it would shape their future, but in time, their stories became intertwined with its legacy. As Brian notes, the real surprise was “the profound, lifelong impact the program had on my family and career.”
As Scott reflects on his journey from a teenage student to the board chair, he acknowledges that his time at EXPLO has “touched everything I do.” EXPLO was never just a program. It was a proving ground, an environment where experimentation, risk-taking, and belief didn’t just create new ideas but new paths for the people who passed through it.