Digital Age Academy

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has left many people insecure about their futures. This is especially true of underserved youth around the U.S., who are often unable to access a sufficient college education preparing them to adapt. 

To tackle this problem, our program targets underserved high school juniors and seniors. We nurture 21st-century skills in these students to develop them into a diverse, creative, and agentive force for the future of the tech industry. Using our online project-based curriculum and a mentorship team of professionals, we teach students about ideation, problem-solving, digital literacy, entrepreneurship, cross-cultural communication, and leadership.

Students learn how to identify problems in their communities and iteratively develop solutions to them, empowering them to eventually create their own scalable startups or help their families' businesses thrive. Our solution ultimately contributes to UN-SDGs-1 ('No Poverty'), 4 ('Quality Education'), 8 ('Decent Work and Economic Growth') and 10 ('Reduced Inequality').

African, Latinx, and Native American students are disproportionately excluded from career and academic opportunities that would allow them to benefit from our rapidly digitizing economy. They represent 30% of high school students in the United States, yet only 5% of all startup founders.  A majority of students in the lowest fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum are members of these underrepresented cultural groups, and 72% of this quintile is not enrolled in postsecondary schools three years after high school graduation. Among these unenrolled, 36% are also unemployed. 

As automation and artificial intelligence accelerate their elimination of low-skill, entry-level service jobs, we see how exclusion from career and academic opportunities makes young people in these underserved minority groups particularly vulnerable. 

At Digital Age Academy, we address this problem by empowering US high school juniors and seniors from this lowest fifth of the socioeconomic distribution (about 65 million people). We provide the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to successfully access higher-skilled positions or start bold new entrepreneurial endeavors. These skills will help these underserved high school students adapt to our fast-changing information age economy and gain access to its many benefits and opportunities.

Digital Age Academy provides online project-based workforce and entrepreneurial development programs targeted to the immediate needs of digital industries. We train this skillset to underserved 11th and 12th graders using learning sessions, practical projects, and direct mentorship from tech-related and artificial intelligence-oriented industry professionals. Our objective is to ensure that our students are empowered with the soft, technical, and entrepreneurial skills they need to identify and solve real-world problems around them. 

Our 4-part, 12-month program starts with the “Ideation” stage, where students learn to brainstorm and identify community-based/societal/market problems. Then, under the “Project” stage they team up with peers and work under the mentorship of a relevant industry professional mentor. They guide students to develop the specific technical skills (e.g. programming, data analysis, app development) and soft skills (e.g., leadership, collaboration, time management) necessary to successfully complete their projects.  

More ambitious students who are interested in transforming their ideas into startups can choose to enter the “Incubator” and “Accelerator” stages. The accelerator places the most promising business pitches in front of corporate investors who can choose to fund projects with the most promise of entrepreneurial success.

Our programs are targeted at 11th and 12th grade high school students from underserved communities, mainly from the lowest fifth socioeconomic status group. We partner with high schools in poor neighborhoods nationwide to recruit students. We constantly ask for feedback from our students and consult with their teachers and counselors to dynamically modify our programs based on their needs. We also partner with corporates and acquire mentors from different industrial sectors. Corporates and our expert mentors guide us on the immediate needs of the market and skills they would look for to hire our graduates. 

During our pilot program in the Fall 2020, we partnered with two high schools in the South Bronx in New York City, but we are currently expanding to reach more schools nationwide for our one-year program starting in the Fall 2021.

Students in our program develop several tech and soft skills through our workforce and entrepreneurial development programs to be prepared for the skilled jobs in tech or create new startup businesses after graduation. In addition to acquiring skills through project-based learning, they define projects around problems they identify in their own communities. The outcomes of their projects can further impact their communities. For example, a student developing an app for her family’s business learns how to create an app that opens up more job opportunities for her and at the same time enhances the economy of their family business.

Community-oriented training is one of our primary pursuits. High school students are more inclined to contribute to the communities wherein they feel a sense of belonging. This felt bond will encourage our students to revisit their communities with a creative eye and discover new challenges to undertake. Further, with developing their cross-cultural and collaborative skills, the students can bridge the gap between the needs and remedies of their communities and those of others.

Our solution equips the next generation of workforce (11th and 12th graders) from underserved and marginalized communities with relevant digital literacy and leadership skills to enable participation in the digital economy as a skilled workforce or an entrepreneur seeking to create their own startup business. Although it is highly aligned with the second choice, we chose “Other” since we only target junior and senior high school students in our programs therefore the term “regardless of age” in the second choice is not relevant.

We ran a pilot program during the Fall 2020 semester with two high schools in the South Bronx in New York City and analyzed the performance during the Spring 2021. We have modified our program by adding an entrepreneurship education component to the already tested workforce development program. Accordingly, the length of our program has changed to one year instead of one semester. We are still at the piloting phase and deploying our tested service with a modified business model and expanding our target students to a few more schools from the states of New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.

Digital Age Academy is a unique program that combines workforce development programs with entrepreneurial development programs in technology, data, and artificial intelligence fields targeting underserved 11th/12th graders. The workforce development program prepares high school students for semi-skilled jobs in tech-related industries right after graduation. The entrepreneurship program trains creative, agentive, and flexible leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs in tech-related fields. There have been a few interventions that provide workforce development and a couple that provide entrepreneurship education, however it is especially rare to see both of these interventions combined. The combination of these two programs make the Digital Age Academy a unique initiative to empower the underserved youth in the US for the future of work. 

Both programs start with an “Ideation” stage where students learn how to identify needs and problems in their community or society and how to generate a valuable idea to address those needs. The personalized step-by-step guidance throughout the “Project” stage and collaboration among peers will instill many lifelong technical, soft, and entrepreneurial skills in students. The entrepreneurial “Incubator”/”Accelerator” program puts students in touch with current tech entrepreneurs to receive first-hand instructions, advice, and investment funds for their startup projects. Regardless of the outcome of the startup projects, Digital Age Academy helps students develop an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to self-efficacy and self-regulated learning.

We are currently recruiting 100 students for our first-year program starting in Fall 2021. The goal is to reach 500 students in the second year and up to 5,000 students within five years by scaling in the U.S. nationwide and then globally. In addition to directly impacting the students, we will indirectly impact their families and communities. Since the startup projects are mainly defined around needs in students’ communities, the outcome of the project can further improve the situation they have targeted to improve. For example, a student developing an ordering app for their family’s restaurant enhances the economy of their family business, which further improves the quality of life in their neighborhood.

Short-term:

• Ensuring the participation of female and students of color (50% female, more than 80% students of color) in all stages of the program

• Self-assessment of progress of learning soft, technical, and entrepreneurial skills

• Self-assessment of self-efficacy development

• Peer-assessment of the project progress and collective learning goals

• Mentor-assessment of individual progress

• Mentor-assessment of collective learning progress

All acquired through quantitative and qualitative surveys and interviews. 

 Medium-term:

• Number of students finding internship positions within three months of completing the program

• Number of students who launch a startup at the end of our accelerator program

Long-term:

• Number of students finding internships within four years of completing the program

• Number of startups founded by students within ten years of completing the program
  We will stay in touch with our students for a long period of time (more than ten years).

• Full-time: 1
• Part-time: 3
• Contractors: 20
• Summer interns: 2

None are currently paid, but we are looking for funding to pay the salary of our full-time and part-time staff and the compensation of our contractors.

The co-founder and executive director (Dr. Azadeh Keivani) is an immigrant living in NYC with a Ph.D. in physics and years of experience in academia. Her interest in education increased when she mentored a group of underserved high schoolers at the American Museum of Natural History for a year. She then moved on with her academic career at Columbia university where teaching undergraduates boosted her interest in innovative pedagogical methods in education. The nature of her cutting-edge research utilizing AI made her more concerned about rapid progress in AI and the future of work for the underserved communities, led her to come up with the idea of the Digital Age Academy.

Our board of directors also include Dr. Christine Cain who is an African American with a Ph.D. in biology from Columbia and years of college and high school education experience, currently teaching at a charter school in a poor neighborhood in NYC, Dr. Ali Mostashari who is an immigrant, MIT graduate, the co-founder of the Digital Age Academy, and the CEO of LifeNome with years of experience in academia, public sector and entrepreneurship. He previously served as a Program Manager and Strategic Resource Manager at the United Nations Development Programme in NYC for projects related to development in sub-Saharan Africa, overseeing a development portfolio of over $1.2 billion.

Our education advisor (Dr. Sanaz Farhangi) is an immigrant living in Florida who has a Ph.D. in education and currently studies social change through STEM education.

In addition to instilling lifelong skills in our students, we’d like to develop self-efficacy in them through different approaches. One is through interacting with our team including their immediate mentors. Therefore, it is critical for us to have a diverse team of mentors including different races that match our students’. We currently have a diverse group of mentors and advisors who share similar backgrounds with our students (mainly African American, Latinx, and immigrants). We specifically are currently looking to recruit more African American professional mentors.

Our board of directors have three members who have different backgrounds: one African American woman, one Middle Eastern woman, and one Middle Eastern man.

We would love to join a powerful network of impact-minded people who care about empowering the underserved communities through innovative educational technology methods to receive strategic and financial advice.

We currently need to raise and secure funding in order to sustain the development and growth of our program. Additional funding opportunities will help us overcome the financial barriers we mentioned in a previous question. 

Acquiring more highly qualified mentors and entrepreneurs for our program was another barrier we talked about before that we hope to get support through potential partnership by joining the Solve team. 

We’d also love to get help with marketing strategies and media exposure and grow our social entrepreneurial network. Due to the nature of our program that utilizes several different platforms including cloud services and programming and data analysis hubs for our students, we’d also appreciate the in-kind support of online platforms and software licenses.

Our current team includes professionals from academia and industry. An area we would love to receive help would be in the marketing field. We would love to have marketing experts helping us in better outreach and advertisement. The financial support can definitely help us grow and serve more students from the underserved communities. In addition, acquiring more professional mentors for our programs and more diverse influential people to our board will help us reach our financial and strategic goals in a short time window.

We plan to partner with corporates who share similar values with us to empower the underserved communities especially the next generation of workforce through their corporate social responsibilities. We would also love to partner with other individuals and organizations who can help us partner with high schools in the underserved neighborhoods to recruit the right audience (high school students from underserved communities in the U.S.).

We are a U.S.-based program serving secondary students (high school juniors and seniors) from underserved communities to access digital literacy that empowers them for the future of work. All programs occur in an experiential learning format under mentorship of professionals from the tech industry. Since our programs start with an “Ideation” stage, we empower students to identify problems in their own communities and generate innovative solutions to address those problems. The development of an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to instilling technical and soft skills will open up new doors for their future by both finding and creating jobs in the digital world.

Our solution equips the next generation of workforce (11th and 12th high schoolers) regardless of gender, education, location, or ability, with culturally relevant digital literacy skills to enable participation in the digital economy. This is almost exactly the second goal of the HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity. All of our students are from underserved and marginalized communities and we prepare them with relevant digital literacy and leadership skills to empower them for the future of work either as a skilled workforce or an entrepreneur seeking to create their own startup business.