As GiftedandTalented.com founder Matthew Mugo Fields told Time magazine in 2015, "Intelligence should be seen as the end goal, not the starting point." To that end, his website's advanced learning programs–developed by Stanford University–weren't created exclusively for children who have already achieved academic success.

Using 25 years of ongoing research by Stanford University, the online curriculum uses non-traditional techniques to get students of all levels thinking about academics in more engaging, practical ways which offer real-world application. For instance, a math unit might culminate in a project that asks the student to power a city using different energy sources. Or a lesson on speed and distance might use a space-travel game to demonstrate how quickly asteroids will hit the pilot's spacecraft.

Whatever the subject, the curriculum is personalized and adaptive, allowing kids to bypass skills they've mastered in favor of topics they struggle with and helping many kids improve their standardized test scores to more than twice the national average, according to a study done by New York University.