Innervate

Powering the next revolution in education by providing teachers with free, expert created resources to implement project-based learning.

The predominant education systems and teaching methods in primary and secondary schools around the world are centered around a flawed incentive structure and lack a crucial feature of how humans have evolved to learn. Success in schools is largely defined by performance on frequent exams, metrics that cease to exist beyond the formal education systems. Furthermore, students are taught content and knowledge that is structured around disciplines rather than real-world problems and applications, a phenomenon that is especially prevalent in the STEM fields. This lack of knowledge application negatively affects the learning experience. Students are inundated with a constant stream of information; however, the vast majority do not have the capacity to remember everything and have adjusted to remember that which they deem important. At Innervate, we aim to reform primary and secondary school education with curricula that focus on contextualizing the importance of knowledge within real-word problems during the teaching process.

Our approach integrates a project-based learning methodology into existing curricula. Through our well-curated projects, students simultaneously learn and apply their skills to real-world problems. This provides students with broader significance and context about what they are learning and why it is important. There are already a number of schools that have made project-based learning a central tenet, such as the Da Vinci public charter schools and Ad Astra, a highly sought after private school started by Elon Musk. However, such schools are few and far between. Furthermore, successfully scaling and implementing project-based learning poses a number of challenges. The primary challenge is that the process of developing, testing, and refining interdisciplinary projects that integrate various parts of the academic curriculum while providing a rewarding experience for students is time and resource intensive. It is this scaling issue that we are committed to solving. We are creating a platform with a free library of high-quality, carefully crafted projects to assist teachers and educators around the globe and provide them with the necessary curriculum material to implement project-based learning.

Over the past decade, Khan Academy has helped democratize education by making world class material available to anyone in the world for free. At Innervate, we believe our solution will catalyze the next leap in the improvement and democratization of education globally. Lowering barriers and enabling teachers to implement experiential methods will enrich the learning experience. Constantly working on projects that require thinking critically about how to utilize interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems will spur innovation and creativity. The students will also work with their peers in teams to tackle problems, thus providing ample opportunities for social and emotional learning.

We are developing a process for solving the education challenge. The currently available resources for developing a project-based curriculum are sparse and of poor quality. Furthermore, crafting projects can be particularly challenging in communities with high student-teacher ratios. Our approach provides educators with a broad range of concrete projects that are centered on real world problems, so that they do not have additional responsibilities placed on them. We believe that working with educators to integrate our projects into already existing curriculum is more impactful than starting anew.

While our proposal is a process for solving the education challenge, technology is an integral part of our platform and of the projects we propose. In order to disseminate project resources to the various educators, we aim to utilize a web-based platform. Furthermore, our STEM project portfolio will utilize a broad range of technologies, from electromagnets and metamaterials to CRISPR-based gene editing and machine learning.

Over the next 12 months, we plan to:

1. Develop a curated repository of projects focused on math, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science for grades 7-10

2. Reach out to more educators to develop relationships and learn their teaching philosophies

3. Expand implementation of our projects to 50 schools across India

Over the next three to five years, Innervate has four aims:

1. Complete development of 500 projects spanning a variety of fields. These projects will have been iterated upon with feedback.

2. Expand resources available on our platform across the following

   1. Age & Academic Content

   2. Complexity

   3. Financial Resources

   4. Languages

3. Start a crowd-sourced section within the platform for individuals around the world to contribute project ideas.

4. Track the impact of project-based learning on students.

5. Expand implementation across the Indian subcontinent.

By continuously expanding our implementation across geographical boundaries and investing in marketing and publicity, we will be able to impact more students over time.

We will establish partnerships with reputable school networks, such as the national Delhi Public School system, and reach out to educators who are interested in implementing project-based learning. We will initially work with interested teachers from three schools within the network to understand the scope of their curriculum. Based on feedback from these, we will iterate and scale up deployment to 50 schools. In the early phases, we will work directly with the educators in their classrooms to help with deployment. As we scale up, we will provide all the necessary material through our online platform.

We have been working on creating and delivering experiential learning sessions for high school students in India. The initial phase was designed to understand the subtleties in the fusion of a project-based curriculum with regular classes in these schools. This was a success with the team directly engaging with over 500 students and tens of educators across different private and public schools. In addition to the constant support and mentorship, the students were exposed to a whole new methodology that satiated their inherent curiosity for application-based learning.

In 12 months, we expect to serve 1500 students in 50 schools. We will provide educators with projects and accompanying material that integrate into existing curricula. In three years, we hope to introduce the platform into thousands of schools and scale our own implementation efforts to over 200 schools. We will focus on educators who are passionate about project-based learning but do not have the bandwidth to design projects. Because learning will accompany application, we expect improved retention, creativity, and inquisitiveness in students. While these effects can take time, our pilot work in India has shown tangible impacts within 1-year.

Our team shares a common passion to improve the education system and help nurture the next generation of problem solvers. We have reached out to a variety of educators across India and have developed an understanding of the issues with the current education system. We believe that our combined experiences in engineering, life sciences, and finance will help us craft projects that are practical and have real-world implications. Lastly, we are willing to adapt. We know that we do not have all the answers, and will seek out advice from domain experts.

As a non-profit, our revenue model for the foreseeable future will be comprised of:

1. Grants from philanthropic organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Corporate donations from companies that are interested in improving the education systems in their local communities. Specifically in India, companies are required by law to donate 2% of profits to charity.

3. Hosting company-sponsored contests and hackathons.

4. Fundraising events hosted by celebrities that understand the shortcomings of the education system and are interested in helping to improve the current state.

5. Small individual contributions, similar to the fundraising efforts of Wikipedia and Khan Academy, from our growing pool of beneficiaries (i.e. schools, students, and parents)

Like Wikipedia and Khan Academy, we believe that based on the value that our platform brings to education systems and the generosity of countless individuals and organizations, we are positioned for long-term sustainability.

Reforming the education system is a complex problem and Solve has the network to help us connect with educators around the world. These educators will help us apply our project-based curricula in their classrooms, ultimately allowing us to iterate on and improve our strategy over time.

Some of the key barriers to success are:

1. Creating content that is helpful and easy to use for teachers, who by in large, will be the ones ultimately using the material to mentor and guide students

2. Refining the educational model to maximize the impact of experiential learning

3. Capturing qualitative and quantitative measures of the advantages of experiential learning over the present education systems

4. Communicating these advantages to teachers, parents, and students

5. Scaling implementation of experiential learning quickly and efficiently

By providing mentorship, visibility, and access to an extensive peer network, Solve can help us overcome these technical and non-technical barriers.