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Abstract
<em>In this exploratory study, we report results from hosting two rounds of an open innovation competition challenging young people age 13-18 to develop a method for carbon mitigation. In both challenges, teams worked within the classroom and extensively on their own time out-of-school. The challenges were structured to engage participants to work collaboratively and independently in an open-ended, goal-oriented way, yet constrained their work by the parameters of the challenge, and supported it by a suite of tools, and resources. Evidence of learning science concepts and practices, student persistence, and the enthusiasm of participants, teachers and coaches, convince us that the Challenge structure and format is highly worthy of further development and investigation. Our findings indicate that Challenges such as this have the potential to enlarge the “ecosystem” of learning environments in the formal education system.</em>
Highlights
The “ecosystem” of formal STEM education has always included activities such as science competitions, science fairs, and field trips
In this exploratory study, we report results from hosting two rounds of an open innovation competition challenging young people age 13-18 to develop a method for carbon mitigation
Crowdsourced open innovation challenges are promising candidates to add to the science education ecosystem because they provide students with opportunities to participate in an exciting problem space, to engage in a social structure that allows engagement with peers and with scientists about real science (Snow & Dibner, 2016), and to take agency for their own learning
Summary
The “ecosystem” of formal STEM education has always included activities such as science competitions, science fairs, and field trips. 1.1 Theoretical Framework To our knowledge, the Innovate to Mitigate competition differs from other climate-related competitions (e.g., the Trust for Sustainable Living, Connect 4 Climate) in important respects It drew on crowdsourcing in the competition community to elicit the best thinking of participant teams, used social media to support student participation, and involved deep engagement with science and technology. We hypothesize that the “previously unexploited collective intelligence” (Bull et al, 2008) of young people will be engaged, since many features of real world crowdsourcing competitions align with features of existing learning environments known to be effective and engaging These include: engagement with a real world problem (Falk et al, 2010), involvement in an engineering design process that makes authentic practices accessible to learners (Edelson & Reiser, 2006), learning in depth (Roth & Lee, 2003), opportunities to communicate science findings (Passmore & Stewart, 2002), opportunity for sustained engagement (Scardamalia, 2003; Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2009) and engagement in problem-/project-based learning (Ravitz, 2009; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Edelson, & Reiser, 2006; Wirkala & Kuhn, 2011; Strobel & von Barneveld, 2009). We report outcomes related to three overarching research questions: (1) What was the nature of the Challenge experience? (2) What did students learn? and (3) To what extent did the competition support student innovation?
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