TMSA
Charlotte
How a STEM-focused charter school used Dream Chaser Kids during the peak of the 2020 pandemic shift to online learning — sustaining engagement during instructional hours and improving problem-solving by 60% among their highest-performing students.
Improvement
Students
Deployment
The gap between technical knowledge and real-world application
TMSA Charlotte (formerly QueenCity STEM) is a rigorous charter school with a strong academic reputation — their students score well on standardized measures and consistently land on the Dean's List. But school leadership identified a persistent gap: students who excelled at structured problems struggled when problems were open-ended, ambiguous, or required them to lead the solution.
The question leadership asked was provocative: if our best students are already academically strong, can Dream Chaser Kids still move the needle? That question shaped the entire deployment — and the answer reshaped how TMSA thinks about what "high performance" means.
Sustaining engagement during the pandemic pivot
TMSA ran Dream Chaser Kids with 18 Dean's List students from January 2020 to January 2021. As the COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive, sudden shift to remote learning, Dream Chaser Kids remained embedded directly within instructional hours.
When standardized testing was paused and traditional curriculum delivery faltered across the country, Dream Chaser's project-based, talent-driven structure provided TMSA students with a necessary anchor. It gave them agency over their learning during a period of intense global ambiguity.
60% improvement. Among students who were already excelling.
Because standardized academic tests cannot capture growth in students who are already maxing out those tests, we deployed the validated Problem Solving Inventory (PSI) pre- and post-deployment. The PSI isolates a student's tolerance for unstructured problems and ambiguity.
The assessments showed a 60% improvement in problem-solving capabilities across the cohort. This is notable not only because these students were Dean's List performers, but because this growth occurred during a global pandemic that fundamentally disrupted traditional educational structures.
A new case for enrichment: not remediation, but elevation
The TMSA deployment reframes the conversation about who enrichment programs are for. Dream Chaser Kids is not a remediation tool — it's an elevation tool. High-performing students have untapped dimensions of capability that standardized curriculum doesn't reach. The 60% problem-solving gain among Dean's List students is the evidence.
For STEM-focused schools and districts, this creates a new argument: Dream Chaser isn't a supplement to your rigor — it's the application layer your rigor has been missing. Students who can solve structured problems learn to solve unstructured ones. Students who know STEM learn to use it for something.
"Empowering our students with a holistic education is not just our aim but our responsibility. Dream Chaser Kids has allowed us to bridge the gap between traditional STEM subjects and the real-world skills required for the future. Together, we're sculpting pioneers, not just learners."
(formerly QueenCity STEM School)