Our Fifth Graders Launched a Nationally Recognized Food Truck
Success doesn’t have an age requirement.
PBS News recently did a piece on Alpha School’s fifth grade food truck. Check it out!
Saturday morning in Austin. You’re standing in the lobby of a car dealership (not necessarily your first choice on a weekend morning) when you look outside and see a food truck in the parking lot. Amazing, you think. Some breakfast sounds great.
Outside, a line forms in the Texas sun. You smell sizzling bacon and something else, something doughy and nostalgic. Pancakes. At the cash register, a young boy (Ten? Twelve?) takes orders. When it’s your turn, he gives you a smile: “What can I get started for you today?” And that’s when you realize. This isn’t someone’s dutiful son or nephew helping out with the family business. The entire kitchen crew is ten, eleven, twelve years-old. You can see them flipping pancakes, frying bacon, printing tickets, serving food. And now, the line is 20 people deep. Orders are flying in faster than the tickets can print.
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. No, this isn’t child labor. This is the Lil’ Dippers food truck, proudly owned and operated by fifth and sixth graders at Alpha School.
A few feet away, their teacher. Bryan. He watches and observes, mostly keeping an eye on the hot griddles and ovens. (The kids are handling the customers like pros.) When your food is ready — “order up! ” — you march over to Bryan, pancakes in hand.
“You have to tell me the story of this food truck.”
He laughs.
“Where do I start?”
Applying knowledge changes the game
As an Alpha guide (we often call our teachers “guides”), Bryan’s job was simple: teach his fifth-grade class about financial literacy. In a traditional classroom, that means worksheets and lectures. At Alpha? It means handing kids $20, taking them to a grocery store, and telling them to figure out how to feed 10+ people.
Bryan first came up with the idea of launching a food truck because he knew, as a previous business owner himself, that entrepreneurship was the fastest, most effective way to understand money. Why? Because it's real-world application of knowledge.
Real-world application of knowledge is a non-negotiable in learning science. (And therefore, a non-negotiable in all of our schools.) It bridges the gap between theoretical concepts and practical understanding. It makes the leap from abstract to concrete, transferring knowledge from students’ brains into their hands.
When students actively engage in tasks (instead of passively listening), two things happen:
First, they grasp the relevance of what they are learning. Equations are no longer a blur of random numbers on a page, but a real-world situation they need to know how to navigate. (We see only the tiniest sliver of this in traditional classrooms. Teachers will tell their students: “Now listen up, because one day, you’ll use this equation for this….” But rarely do students apply the knowledge in real-time. As a result, much of what they “learn” trickles right out of their brains in the span of a few days.) Real-world application of knowledge does the opposite. It makes things click in the brains of students. It makes learning come alive. From abstract to concrete. From brain into hands.
Second, students develop essential life skills for future success. How many times in your adult life have you said something like: “Well, I wish I learned how to do that in school!” Too many to count, for me. How to pay taxes. How to buy a home. How to start (and run) a successful business. How to build transferable skills that will set you apart in any industry. The list goes on. But once students understand the relevance of what they’re learning, how it fits into the real-world like a jigsaw puzzle, it fuels their desire to learn even more. They want to build these skills. They want to succeed. Lil’ Dippers food truck is the perfect example.
This food truck is not a fun after school project; it’s a real business, with real risks and real reward, and it’s how Bryan taught his students to apply what they’ve been learning.
First, he taught his students the value of a dollar. “We went to the grocery store,” Bryan explains, “where I gave them $20 and 20 minutes. It was like Supermarket Sweep. They had to come back with enough ingredients to make a meal.” It was chaos (good chaos). Kids sprinting through the aisles, huddling around shopping carts, debating prices. But by the end of that day, something important clicked: everything costs something, and money runs out fast.
The next step: what kind of food did they want to sell? That was completely up to them to decide. Eventually, they came to him with a decision: “Breakfast food is so much cheaper,” they told him. “The profit margins are ridiculous!” (At this, Bryan smiles.) They were right, of course. So breakfast food it was. They named their food truck Lil’ Dippers and built their menu from scratch.
Then came the roles. Head Chef. Sous Chef. DMO — Dishwasher Machine Operator (a title they invented themselves). Bryan guided them, but didn’t dictate. He was there to set guardrails and answer questions, not drive the bus. They did it all themselves: figured out operations, customer service, scheduling, event planning — all of it. Over the course of a year, these fifth graders operated like real entrepreneurs. They catered Alpha’s internal events. They popped up at local businesses. They negotiated margins. They said no to bad deals (i.e. specialty gluten-free bread that wasn’t profitable enough).
“One thing about being an entrepreneur is you have to wear a lot of hats,” Bryan says. “You can’t just be an expert at one thing. You have to know how to handle everything inside your business. So once they got the hang of their own roles, I made them all switch and learn everybody else’s role. That was probably the hardest part for them.”
Instead of falling asleep during algebra, these kids are boots-on-the-ground entrepreneurs. (“NBC News wants to interview us!”) They are cementing, applying, and mastering what they’ve learned in the classroom.
Can you remember what you learned in the fifth grade? I certainly can’t. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d bet these kids have a very different answer to that question by the time they’re my age.
The power of individualized attention
Before Alpha, Bryan ran his own personal-training business — and he noticed a pattern.
“There was a clear pattern I saw in coaching,” Bryan says. “The results for my personal training clients were always better than my group class clients. Their growth trajectory was so much higher when they received individualized attention.”
That’s exactly why Bryan became a personal trainer in the first place. “I’m obsessed with helping people become the best version of themselves,” he says. “I love watching them push past what they thought was possible.”
Fast forward to three things happening, back to back to back, that changed the course of Bryan’s life:
He earned his MBA in psychology
His first daughter was born
And he heard about Alpha School for the first time.
It was the perfect God-wink. Everything lined up at once. Now, he could pour years of personal coaching and psychology expertise into his newfound passion for raising the next generation. (You can probably guess what caught his eye about Alpha School: individualized education.)
At Alpha, Bryan doesn’t operate like a traditional teacher. He doesn’t lecture at the front of the classroom or spend his nights grading papers. Instead, he coaches. His job is to get to know each kid on a deep level. He meets them where they are, finds out what drives them, and shows them what they’re truly capable of. And then, he pushes them to success. What traditional classrooms don’t take into account is that every kid learns differently, needs different things, and operates uniquely under pressure. A good teacher knows: when a student is stuck on a difficult problem, what makes things click? When they’re feeling sluggish, what motivates them to learn? It’s up to the teacher to learn the nuances and guide the student towards success. There is no black-and-white rulebook. It’s changing all of the time. Some kids are motivated by free time. Some by video games. Some by sports. One of Bryan’s students, a football fanatic, gets a coaching pep talk whenever he’s stuck on a problem: “It’s the fourth quarter. You’ve got the ball. You can’t freeze in the pocket.” It works every time — because it’s personalized.
“We have one-on-one lunches with them, just to get to know them and understand who they are,” Bryan says. “No talking about school. We just want to connect with them, because trust building is huge. What do they like? What's their best vacation? What movies do they watch?”
As an Alpha guide, Bryan builds trust with his students, helps them find their “why”, and pushes them from extrinsic motivation (earning a prize) to intrinsic motivation (feeling pride in what they’ve built). Then, he stands back and watches them do things no one expects fifth graders to do.
And they deliver. Again and again.
“Sometimes I step back and think, ‘Yeah…this is actually pretty crazy,’” Bryan says with a laugh. “It’s truly wild to see the things that these kids are capable of. Whatever expectation you have, get rid of it. They're always able to do it. Our goal is to never push them to the point of burnout. They're still kids. They need to have fun. They need to be kids as long as they possibly can. But we push them to their potential, and we see time and time again that they're capable of a lot more than they probably even think they're capable of themselves.”
Bryan’s favorite part about being a teacher at Alpha?
“I love seeing these kids have ‘Aha!’ moments,” he says. “When they finally have that internal pride of feeling accomplished. I know that they're gonna be better for it. Seeing them grow is the coolest thing — it’s super rewarding. That's why I got into coaching: to help people physically become the best version of themselves. Now I get to do that educationally and emotionally.
“In my school growing up, I was just a cog in the wheel. I didn't realize how I learned until later on in life. I wish I had someone help me apply myself better, to remove those limits for me. That's what I'm trying to do with these kids.”
Success doesn’t have an age requirement
Kids don’t need to wait until they’re “old enough” to do meaningful work. There are no gatekeepers to success, no age-requirement for real-world accomplishment. It’s time we stop lowering the bar.
When you see Lil’ Dippers in person — smelling the bacon, hearing the orders fly, seeing the joy and the hustle and the pure agency in these kids — you realize it’s something much bigger than a school project. You start to reimagine what’s possible for your kids’ education, what happens when you stop treating kids like cogs in a system and start treating them like future builders.
Not “someday.”
Now.
Not when they’re “old enough.”
Now.
If you want your child to grow up in a normal school, there are thousands of schools that can help. But if you want them to grow into confident builders — leading, creating, solving problems, lighting up with the joy of their own progress — Alpha School could be the school for them. (You can check out our campuses here.)
Creating future-ready kids doesn’t happen by accident. It happens on purpose, with intention, by design. In this case, one parking-lot-pancake at a time.