About
Lucas means bringer of light
Our vision
Our goal has always been to bring affordable, high-quality, educational, and joyful experiences to children and families. We pursue this goal through guided discovery: thinking led by curiosity, creating through discovery, searching for significance, and contributing to real-world problems that matter.
Lucas Academy is a nonprofit educational project based in Orange County. It began around our family table, where children asked questions, tried ideas, and made things. Those small experiments grew into classes, camps, online tools, and creative projects, and we continue to build with teachers, volunteers, parents, partners, and children.
We believe high-quality learning should be affordable and accessible. Program fees help sustain classes and camps, while donations help build and extend the educational work through equipment and supplies, safe learning environments, public educational resources, and outreach to more children and families. Resources serve the learning; they are not the purpose of the project.
Where appropriate and legally possible, Lucas Academy intends to release original public-facing educational and creative materials that it owns under CC0, so that others can use, adapt, and share them freely. We will respect third-party rights, student and family privacy, and the permissions required for student work, photographs, videos, music, and other contributed materials. Public openness does not mean careless handling of people or their work; it means making what we are authorized to share genuinely available to the public.
Guided discovery means encouraging children to explore while establishing boundaries, helping give direction, and having fun with them. We make room for questions, mistakes, experiments, and unexpected ideas. Most importantly, searching for significance is part of learning. Our founding group is Christian, and we believe that STEM, art, social science, and other fields can lead to deep questions about the meaning and purpose of human life. We are willing to share our faith and explain why we see these connections, but we do not require or pressure anyone to accept our beliefs.
Who we are
The people who build, teach, and mentor at Lucas Academy.
Yancy Qin
Content Creator · Coding Instructor & Mentor
I'm a software engineering manager and a PSIA-certified ski instructor. My best memory from years of childhood coding competitions wasn't the coding or the competition — it was inventing games with friends during study breaks in DOS and trading them on floppy disks. That curiosity-led discovery is still how I think kids learn best; I'm grateful for the people who guided me, but I always wished that guidance had come with more fun and more depth — so I built the place I'd have loved as a kid, and I want to share it with everyone.
Eunice Yue
Art Teacher & Mentor · Studio Artist
Eunice is an art teacher and a wonderful wife and mother of three. She graduated summa cum laude from Biola University with a major in Studio Art. While earning her California art-teaching certification, she has created and taught many art classes for kids — with love and real specialty. But most importantly, she loves teaching, and her students love and respect her deeply.
Louise Yang
Content Creator · Coding Mentor
Louise is an EECS master’s graduate from UC Irvine with a background in computer vision, robotics, and AI systems. Her work in computer vision and computational optimization grew into a broader interest in helping people think more clearly with technology. At Lucas Academy, she helps students use AI and coding as materials for curiosity, creativity, and building ideas of their own.
Haoxuan Li
Coding Instructor
Haoxuan Li is a software engineering undergraduate student at UCI with a deep interest in software development and simulation. He is currently planning various passion projects with his peers while continuing his studies. He enjoys exploring how complex systems work through examining practical examples and careful attention to detail. Beyond technology, he has a hobby in classical music and often combines creativity with technical thinking in his design concept. Most importantly, Haoxuan Li believes teaching is a two-way interaction, and he looks forward to learning from the curiosity, ideas, and perspectives of younger students just as much as he hopes to help them grow as a student himself.
How it started
Lucas Academy began around real tables: kids trying things, parents opening doors, teachers and mentors bringing coding, art, faith, and hard-won experience into the same room. The first prototypes came from our family, but the academy became real as more people joined the work. We are building a community where children can discover, question, create, and be known.
Real moments from the community that shaped Lucas Academy: kids learning together, mentors guiding, and families cheering the work forward.
What we believe
Lucas means light — and for us, light is enlightenment: not information alone or forced answers, but understanding, wisdom, and purpose. In an age of AI, learning to think, judge, and create matters more than ever — but ability needs direction. We help kids build it, then use it to know themselves, recognize what matters, and act with wisdom and love.
How we teach
We guide discovery. We do not simply pour answers into kids. Learning should feel a little like philosophical inquiry: observe carefully, ask better questions, test ideas, listen to others, and decide what is true and worth doing.
Discover before declaring
Kids begin with what they can see, play, make, and wonder about. We help them notice patterns before naming conclusions.
Explore without coercion
Questions are welcome. Mistakes are useful. We do not use pressure, shame, or performance tricks to force a child toward a prefabricated answer.
Create with responsibility
Creating with AI is not just accepting an answer. Students learn to question what AI gives them, build their own direction, and test creative ideas through the work they make.
Faith, shared with humility
Our community is mostly made up of Christians who affirm biblical truth, so faith is part of our life together. We may share that faith naturally and openly, but our posture is invitation rather than indoctrination: we want kids to seek, ask, understand, and respond honestly.
Why we are non-profit
We are non-profit because our faith teaches us to value people more than profit, and to see children as deeply valuable, not as a market to extract from. Money matters because programs need resources, but it is not the purpose. Our purpose is formation, access, safety, and the long-term good of kids and families.
How we think about partnership
We hope to collaborate broadly with non-profit organizations, churches, community groups, companies, families, and volunteers.
Lucas Academy has a clear Christian foundation, but we do not require every family, student, or partner to share the exact same story. We hope to walk together with mutual respect, and we ask partners to understand and not work against the core values that shape this community.