Learning has never been something that stops outside the confines of school walls. Digital Promise sees community involvement as a way to create powerful learning opportunities, while also helping find solutions to the issues that hit closest to home.
The Ciena Solutions Challenge, a global design challenge inviting middle and high school students to design solutions that address the Sustainable Development Goals within their communities, launched another round in 2022.
Digital Promise celebrated 100 projects submitted, including 20 projects that received a 2023 Ciena Solutions Challenge Sustainability Award and 24 from the Ciena Solutions Challenge Model Schools in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ottawa, Canada. From an anti-vaping campaign in Colorado in the United States, to an interception device to prevent garbage from entering the ocean in Taiwan, these projects showcase the talents of youth creators and changemakers from around the world.
Hear from educators whose students have participated in the design challenge:
Photo courtesy of Neil Arnett.
There’s a long-held assumption that technical creativity and innovation in the United States are largely limited to the confines of California’s Silicon Valley and the northeast United States. However, rural communities have long maintained problem-solving cultures that can be relevant to present-day concerns.
Digital Promise partnered with two school districts in Eastern Kentucky to support the design of computational thinking (CT) lessons that are connected to their local, cultural heritage of problem solving. The Drawing on Kinship project also supports the districts to host parent nights and a student project showcase that reinforce connections between CT education, local needs, and heritage.
Mary Slone, a high school teacher at Floyd County Schools in Kentucky, attended a training where she and other educators shared the stories around objects displaying ingenuity. This led to a revelation:
From brown-bag faux hornet’s nest to quilts to modified lawnmowers, each story was a reminder that I, along with my peers, have borne witness and been impacted by makers—people who live on the edge of disruption and choose to use it as an agent.
– Mary Slone, a high school teacher at Floyd County Schools in Kentucky
Surrounded by this “Appalachian Ingenuity,” there was an entire ecosystem of makers, creators, problem-solvers just waiting to be tapped by local students. At this training, teachers began brainstorming ways their students could identify problems in their community, thus creating a motivated, invested innovator, who could draw on a long history of ingenuity.
Since the release of Digital Promise’s white paper, “Designing a Process for Inclusive Innovation,” the Center for Inclusive Innovation has engaged over 30 districts in 7 initiatives, spanning priority topics that include adolescent engagement in writing, student-led professional development on mental health and racial trauma, culturally relevant Socratic circle discourse, teachers of color recruitment and retention, data equity and interoperability, cybersecurity pathways for opportunity youth, and equitable school systems transformation.
Based on the in-depth pilots of the Inclusive Innovation model with four community-district teams, Digital Promise researchers conducted cross-project studies on: the role of context expertise, the role of student voice, capacity building, racial equity, and the nature of outcomes in Inclusive Innovation. The teams comprise students, family members, teachers, school leaders, district administrators, and other community members who interact with and support youth.
This initial series, Emerging Findings from Inclusive Innovation: An Equity-Centered R&D Model, presents our learnings from 2021 to 2022. We share ongoing progress and lessons based on our experiences with Inclusive Innovation so that as a field, we can generate demand and collectively drive towards inclusive and equity-driven innovation that truly centers and benefits those from historically and systematically excluded communities.
2022 Annual Report