I watched in awe as the man threw himself into the air and spun across the stage. He landed gently and crouched down like a tiger ready to attack, with his sword held out in front of him. It was impressive, but nothing prepared me for what came next: a men balancing his body on tips of spears! I gasped in amazement all the way through this incredible performance of the Shaolin monks.

Trained in the art of Kung Fu at the world famous Shaolin Temple in China, these monks are so strong that they can break bricks on their bodies and so skilled that they can fight blindfolded without getting hurt! So I did a little research and then last summer I travelled high into China's Yuntai Mountains, where the stunning scenery takes your breath away, for a month of training at a real Shaolin school.

I arrived late at night, exhausted by my long journey, but the next day I was woken up by a bell at 5:40 for a run to the top of a nearby mountain! I struggled slowly upwards, and by the time I reached the top, the Chinese students had crawled back down on their hands and knees to build their muscles and were back at the academy, warming up. I looked on in horror as students practised doing the splits!

To my relief, I soon learnt that foreigners don't train with the Chinese students. And when my new 'Shi Fu', or teacher, Master Jin Long arrived, he was calm and patient, not fierce and proud, like I had imagined. We began by practising 'mabu', a basic Kung Fu position. For this, you stand with your legs bent, as if sitting on a chair. I felt like a failure. Master Jin Long came over and told me that I would learn little by little. After the class, he told me that a key secret to Kung Fu was repetition and that I would improve greatly after a lot of practice.

An hour later, we finally got breakfast; large bowls of rice and vegetables. Afterwards, it was straight back to the gym to practise basic punches and kicks. In the afternoon, I chose to study Tai Chi, a martial art which focuses on controlling energy. Physical training finished at 6 pm, after an exhausting 8 hours. Fortunately, evenings were a time to work out our minds, with two hours of either Mandarin Chinese, or meditation classes. By the time the first day was over, I felt almost sick from exhaustion.

But as I showered, to my disappointment, in a cold shower (there is no hot water at the school), I told myself that if Shaolin monks could train from 5 am until late the evening under much harsher conditions with many of them beginning at the age of five, then I could survive a month here!

Well, the month flew by and by the end, I felt incredible. The monks constantly told us that we would build character and learn humility through hardship and discipline and that's exactly what I experienced. Although I couldn't quite break bricks on my head, I left the academy with a new inner strength and determined to work hard to achieve my goals in life. Still, upon my return, I couldn't wait for a hot shower and a relaxing sleep in my comfortable bed.

By Joseph Barnes

Salman Khan, a Harvard University graduate, sits in a converted cupboard at home in Boston. He's studying for a lecture he's going to give, but it won't be a typical hour-long lecture in a lecture theatre for forty or fifty students. Salman's lecture will take place on YouTube, it won't last for more than ten minutes, and it will reach a potential audience of millions. He records up to eight lectures like this every day.

This all grew from a young girl's desire to do better at school. In 2006, Salman's 13-year-old cousin Nadia was having trouble with Maths, so she asked him if he could tutor her. Then when other relatives and family friends asked him when he could tutor them, too, he didn't want to keep explaining the same things over and over again, so he suggested creating videos and putting them on YouTube. To Salman's surprise, his cousin admitted that she preferred the virtual Salman to the real thing! She explained that on YouTube she could watch the clip whenever she wanted and repeat anything she didn't understand. She was learning successfully and Khan realised it was because she could go over and over something at her own pace without feeling embarrassed.

Salman's homemade video lectures soon attracted people's attention on the Net. As he recorded more and more videos, he eventually decided to quit his job as a financial analyst to create a free educational website, the 'Khan Academy'. Before long, tens of thousands of people were watching his lectures every month. In each video, he explains a principle of a subject ranging from Maths, Chemistry and Economics to History and Biology. The clips are far from high tech. Khan never appears in his videos. Instead, with just his voice and his scribbles on a digital sketchpad, he makes a complicated topic entertaining and easy to understand through his informal, chatty style. "My biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says.

When Salman doesn't know anything about the subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course in it first. He researches it until he feels he can explain it in his own words, step by step so that a motivated 7-year-old would understand it. Khan admits that he makes occasional errors with this learn-as-you-go approach, but he believes that students see the process better when they watch him stumble through a problem himself.

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, claims that Khan is his favourite teacher and uses the videos, which now have about 2 million users, with his children. Some teachers are also using the videos as a teaching resource. They have told their students to use Khan's videos at home and have seen fantastic results. As for the future of the academy, Salman is planning to translate his videos into ten languages and he is even thinking of opening his own private school. He is full of new ideas such as not dividing classes by age, using board " he says. games to teach negotiation skills and even teaching history backwards. It seems he's committed to challenging and changing the way people learn. In the meantime, though, it's back to his cupboard to record more videos!

For Paul Skarr it all started with his Sports Science degree requirement to do a work-based learning project. "Most students find work locally, but I was keen to volunteer in a needy part of the world," says Paul. So off he went to Zambia to coach football at a school in a small village not far from the capital, Lusaka. When Paul arrived he found a rundown school house with very few resources. He was amazed to see that the children were using rolled up plastic bags held together with sticky tape to play football! One of Paul's first tasks was to get the children to mark out a full-sized football pitch in a clearing in the woods next to the school. They erected goal posts made from tree branches, too. At the first practice, about 75 youngsters arrived, very eager to go! Some had even come from neighbouring villages. It was some of the children's first opportunity to play proper football, which isn't surprising when a football costs about $60 and the average monthly wage is just $40. The session was a great success. "After we'd finished practice the children clapped excitedly and then they all rushed to clean my boots, and get all the kit ready for the next day!" Paul told us.

One exciting part of each day for Paul was when he and the children beat the ground of the pitch before they started to play to chase away poisonous mamba snakes. But despite some difficulties because of the harsh living conditions, it was a great experience for Paul. “The kids are so happy to play and have a coach even though they have so little else... It really made me step back and think about what's important in life."

Ever since Olivia Stewart was a young girl, she has dreamt of singing in a grand concert hall. Her dream became a reality when she interrupted her Music degree to take a year off on sabbatical to get a taste of opera in Italy. Living with an Italian family and having language lessons each morning was an essential part of the experience. “Mastering the language takes your performance to an entirely different level when you learn not only how to pronounce the words properly, but also the deeper meaning of what you're singing," Olivia says. "Opera is like great literature set to beautiful music. You can't help falling in love with it."

Olivia spent her afternoons having private voice coaching lessons, performance rehearsals and even pilates classes to help develop muscles for better breathing control. The highlight of Olivia's stay, though, was performing opera at an open-air concert in a beautiful piazza.

After she finishes her music degree, Olivia hopes to make it back to Italy and continue studying opera and, she says, "to sample more of the amazing Italian gelato, which is to die for!"