Spark Interactive is officially in the classroom. After a summer of educator previews across San Diego, the mobile Holocaust education experience has begun its school year, and the students it was built for are now the ones walking through it.
Today Spark Interactive is in East County, where our team spent the week at La Mesa Arts Academy in La Mesa. From here it heads across the region on a schedule that is more and more booked, with confirmed visits in San Diego Unified School District, San Dieguito Union High School District, Sweetwater Union High School District, and more. From the coast to the South Bay to the eastern edge of the county, one mobile classroom will reach students in districts across the region.
The First Week With Students
That first week was also the first real test of the curriculum and lesson plans the team has been building for months. It held up. When equipment failed mid-week, the educators pivoted without missing a beat and kept delivering high-quality lessons.
Students made real connections with the material. They engaged each other and presented different aspects of the curriculum to their own classes, processing the information, putting it in their own words, finding the connections, and teaching each other.
A few key moments:
An officer from the La Mesa Police Department joined one of the classes. The students appreciated having him learn alongside them, on their level, and it was one of the most enriching parts of the week.
Two groups of parents came through and were visibly moved. Many more thanked the team for bringing this to their school. One yelled thank you from a car window while driving past.
A teacher told us it was the most powerful Holocaust education experience their students had ever had.
These are core memories for these students, and they are hard to put into words. What the team saw all week was a room full of teenagers deciding this mattered to them.
From Educator Preview to Student Experience
The bookings did not come out of nowhere. They are the direct result of summer days spent putting the experience in front of the people who decide what happens in a classroom.
In late July, more than 500 principals, assistant principals, and district leaders from San Diego Unified stepped inside Spark Interactive during a districtwide administrator day at Patrick Henry High School. The format gave an entire district's leadership a look at the program all at once, rather than one campus at a time.
On August 5, the Goldberg Institute for Holocaust Education brought Spark Interactive and the Anne Frank: A History for Today exhibit to Torrey Pines High School for San Dieguito Union's annual staff in-service day, where more than 1,000 teachers and administrators moved through both offerings. Educators asked the practical questions that decide whether a program actually lands: where it fits in a tenth-grade world history unit, how it pairs with books already on the syllabus, how much class time it takes, and what students need to know before they arrive. The Spark team was onsite to answer every one of them.
Those conversations are now on the calendar as scheduled visits, and the first week proved out what those educators were promised.
What Students Encounter
Spark Interactive travels to campuses at no cost to the school. Inside, students step into an immersive journey through history, resilience, and hope, built on survivor testimony, primary sources, and interactive technology. The experience is self-contained, arrives on wheels, and asks nothing of a school beyond a place to park and a bell schedule.
For schools that want to go further, Anne Frank: A History for Today remains available as a companion. The traveling exhibit is hosted on campus and led by students trained as docents, who guide their peers through the panels. Where Spark delivers a single powerful encounter, the Anne Frank exhibit can anchor a longer unit on prejudice, exclusion, and moral courage.
What Comes Next
The 2026–27 Spark Interactive calendar is filling up. Schools that want to host Spark or the Anne Frank exhibit can contact the Goldberg Institute team to reserve the experience before it's booked.