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 digital skills in these students to develop them into a diverse, creative, and agentive force for the future of the digital 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 digital 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 American, 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 the 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. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated this problem.

At Digital Age Academy, we address this problem by empowering high school juniors and seniors from this lowest fifth of the socioeconomic distribution (about 65 million people). We provide the digital knowledge, skills, tools, and personal networks necessary to successfully access higher-skilled positions or start bold new entrepreneurial endeavors. These skills will help 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 free online project-based workforce development and entrepreneurship training programs targeted to the immediate needs of digital industries. We train underserved 11th and 12th graders using e-learning sessions, data-oriented practical projects, and directly organized e-mentorship from tech-related industry professionals. Our objective is to ensure that our students are empowered with the technical, soft, and entrepreneurial skills they need to identify and solve real-world problems in the digital space around them. 

Our 4-stage, 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 utilizing data science, artificial intelligence, and computer software. Mentors guide students to develop specific technical skills (e.g. programming, data analysis, app development) and soft skills (e.g., leadership, collaboration, critical thinking) necessary to successfully complete their projects.  

More ambitious students who are interested in transforming their ideas into tech 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 historically underserved communities in the United States, including low-income families (the lowest fifth socioeconomic status group), who are highly correlated with underrepresented cultural groups in STEM. So far, 100% of our students have identified themselves as BIPOC. 

To recruit students, we partner with high schools in underserved neighborhoods. Our programs are entirely online, enabling us to accept students from all over the U.S. However, since most of our core team members work in New York City, we have so far formed successful partnerships with high schools and similar nonprofits in NYC. 

During our pilot program in Fall 2020, we partnered with two high schools in the South Bronx in NYC, and we have expanded our reach to more communities by partnering with another high school in the Bronx and a nonprofit serving under-resourced students in the same age group. We are currently reaching out to more schools in NY, NJ, and MD for our one-year program starting in the Fall of 2021.

We consistently request feedback from our students (once per month through a survey, further encouraging students to openly express their opinions and provide feedback to our program managers at any point during the program). We also regularly consult with teachers and counselors to dynamically modify our programs based on students' needs. Importantly, we adjust our training to the immediate needs of the digital market through consultation and advice from our working-professional mentors. Our partner corporations also guide us about the top skills they need to hire our graduates.

Students in our program develop several tech and soft skills through our workforce and entrepreneurial development programs in preparation for skilled jobs in tech or to 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 while simultaneously enhancing 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 communal bond will encourage students to revisit their communities with a creative eye and discover new challenges to undertake. Furthermore, by developing their cross-cultural and collaborative skills, students can bridge the gap between the needs and remedies of their communities and those of others. To better assess those needs, we have established connections with NYC communities, especially local digital equity coalitions.

We prepare youth entering the workforce (high school juniors and seniors) from historically underserved groups for the future of work with free and equitable digital skills, entrepreneurship training, and internship opportunities. Our digital workforce development program instills lifelong soft and digital skills in our students through an experiential learning model, preparing them for semi-skilled jobs or internships in the digital world. Our entrepreneurship training program provides an opportunity for our students to transform their ideas and projects into real startup businesses and helps them develop an entrepreneurial mindset to create their own jobs now or in the future.

We ran a pilot program during the Fall 2020 semester with two high schools in the South Bronx in New York City and analyzed our performance during  Spring 2021. We have modified our program by adding an entrepreneurship training component to the already tested digital workforce development idea. Accordingly, the length of our program has changed to one year instead of one semester. 

We now start with a one-month ideation stage where students learn how to identify needs in their community and generate innovative solutions to address those needs. Students will then work on their projects over a period of five months and if interested transform them into a tech startup. The entrepreneurship program lasts for six months.

With this new model, we would love to test the effectiveness of our project-based training. Therefore we still consider ourselves to be at the piloting phase.

Our solution equips youth in the US communities of color with digital literacy and skills, self-efficacy, entrepreneurial mindset, knowledge, and tools necessary to find or create jobs in the information economy age. Our target students are high school juniors and seniors from historically underserved communities (highly correlated with BIPOC) who are the next generation of workforce, entrepreneurs, and startup founders. Our project-based educational model not only prepares the youth for the future of work, but also creates technology to address community needs through students' projects and startup ideas. This will further help us have social impacts on students, their families, and their communities. We hope by empowering the next generation of BIPOC for technology-related and artificial intelligence-oriented jobs, we help create antiracist and equitable digital workforces in the U.S. 

Our solution is designed by three people of color (African American woman, Middle Eastern woman, and Middle Eastern man) with advanced degrees in STEM and years of experience in education, who deeply care about social justice and racial equity.

Digital Age Academy is a unique program that combines digital 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, such as paid summer internship positions. 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 in addition to a strong team of working-professionals serving as project mentors and startup advisors make the Digital Age Academy a unique practical initiative to empower the underserved youth in the US for the future of work. 

Our programs start with an “Ideation” stage where students learn how to identify needs and problems in their community, society, or market in general and how to generate valuable ideas 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 and provides internship opportunities for the graduates.

Our solution is a new business/educational model that relies on technology to function. We develop data-driven business solutions for partnership, marketing, and fundraising. For example, we thoroughly analyzed the NYC Department of Education's listing of high schools, targeted those that might benefit most from our programs, and formed partnerships for student recruitment.

In addition, all of our programs focus on data science and use data analytics methods and tools. The ideation process happens under the assumption that the solutions can fully utilize data science, artificial intelligence, and digital tools for problem-solving and the projects are all defined in technology-related fields. Depending on the idea and decided by the team, each project will use different programming languages and data analytics tools and methods. For example, a project might use an object-oriented programming language, a scripting language, a spreadsheet, or in some cases a “low-code, no-code” development platform towards their solution. The analysis and storage of data happen in Google cloud platform.

All stages of the program also happen virtually in a hybrid synchronous/asynchronous format using several online platforms, including the video conferencing apps, productivity and collaborative tools, and the Digital Age Academy website for hosting asynchronous materials and easy access to the platforms.

During our pilot program in the fall 2020 semester, four mini-courses (statistics and probability, data analysis in Python, problem solving and information research, productivity and collaborative tools) and four mini-projects (in the fields of finance, health informatics, entertainment analytics, e-commerce) were offered in an online mode with both synchronous and asynchronous components. We used Zoom for our realtime sessions, Panopto (with pop-up quizzes) for our recorded videos, Google workspaces for collaborative activities and Slack for communication. To facilitate easy access to all different components, a specific page was devoted for each course on our website (see e.g. the Statistics and Probability page.) 

Students used different platforms to develop their projects. For example, for our e-commerce project entitled “How long customers stay at a company?” students used Python for programming, while for the finance project entitled “Would you pick $5,000 now or series of $100 monthly payments for 5 years?,” they used a Google spreadsheet to build their calculator providing quantitative answers to the question. For more information about the pilot program, see the orientation video here. Also, read our students’ testimonials. 

We should emphasize that there are significant differences between the one-semester pilot program in the Fall and the one-year program we will start in September 2021. The most important difference is that in the new program students will define and identify the needs and problems in their community or market and try to generate new ideas with the help of our team of working-professional mentors. The projects are not already defined as in the Fall 2020 pilot program. The other noteworthy difference arises due to the new addition of an entrepreneurship training program following the project stage, where students will have the opportunity to transform their project into a real startup with our incubator/accelerator programs.

The general privacy and security concerns in using digital platforms are also applicable to our program considering the nature of several different platforms we integrate to our own web dashboard. By going through trusted systems with high security such as Google products and adding another layer of security by encrypting the access through our website hosted by GoDaddy, we ensure the privacy of our students and their mentors meet the high standards.

In addition, maintaining the high quality of mentorship is one of the risks that our digital workforce development and entrepreneurship education model brings about. Choosing the most qualified mentors and entrepreneurs from the pool of professionals in our immediate and extended network and ensuring their dedication to teaching, mentorship, and advising in addition to their high level of expertise will help us mitigate this risk. 

We are currently recruiting 100 students for our first-year program starting in Fall 2021. Although our registration is open to students across the nation, most of our students are currently being recruited through our partner schools in New York City. The goal is to reach 500 students in the second year from more states and more than 60 thousand students within five years by scaling in the U.S. nationwide. We hope to replicate our model to other countries to make Digital Age Academy's digital workforce development a global educational  model. 

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.

In our first year (2021-22) after the pilot project (fall 2020), we will be serving 100 high school students in grades 11th and 12th, recruited from four partner schools located in underserved neighborhoods in NYC. With that, we estimate to indirectly impact at least four different low-income communities through the outcome of students’ projects/startup businesses defined and started around specific needs in those communities (~60,000 people). An example of an indirect impact is a student who develops an ordering app for their family’s restaurant enhancing the economy of their family business, which further improves the quality of life in their neighborhood.

We will continue to scale by forming new partnerships with high schools from other states in order to recruit 500 underserved students for our second year program (2022-23; impacting lives of ~300,000 people). The goal for the third year (2023-24) is to reach 2500 underserved students (impacting ~1.5 million people). Within five years, we estimate that our programs will serve more than 60 thousand students and impact the economy of at least 1000 marginalized communities across the US (~15 million people). Afterwards, we will also replicate the model in at least two other countries who have already shown interest in joining the Digital Age Academy. 

We build new partnerships with corporations, institutes of higher education, and other nonprofit organizations as we want to provide a wide range of internship opportunities for our graduates, financially sustain our operational costs, and recruit professional employees as volunteer project mentors for our students.

We measure the short-term outcomes of our program in different ways: self-assessment, peer-assessment, and mentor-assessment. Students’ self-assessment of their learning progress is conducted through a repeating questionnaire given to students at the end of each month during the program. This allows us to monitor the trend of individual student’s progress from their self reports. Students indicate their level of learning using a seven-point rating scale, with 1 indicating the lowest familiarity with the topic. We also measure self-efficacy by giving students a set of questions assessing their beliefs in achieving their goals, despite all difficulties they encounter. Analyzing the assessments enables us to monitor progress and evaluate success in instilling each target skill in our students.

We also study peer-assessment of project progress and collective learning goals as well as the mentor-assessment of individual and collective learning progress, conducted through quantitative and qualitative surveys and interviews, designed similarly to the self-assessment questionnaires.

To measure the long-term outcome, we will stay in touch with our students for a few years. Maintaining connection will allow us to monitor their progress after graduation for at least four years. We rely on developing self-efficacy, entrepreneurial habits of mind and skills, in combination with peer and mentor networks to lead to a shift in students’ readiness to join the future of work and change the makeup of entrepreneurship. 

We will also monitor our graduates’ immediate impacts on the economy of their families and communities by their self reports and further interviewing the impacted people.

• 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.

Co-founder and executive director, Dr. Azadeh Keivani is an immigrant from Iran now living in NYC. Growing up in a country with strong societal gender bias, she has always fought for gender equity. Her efforts were extended to issues of racial equity when upon moving to the U.S. she saw racism focused towards people of color and experienced it personally for the first time. Her interest in providing equitable education grew when she mentored a group of underserved high schoolers at the American Museum of Natural History and later taught undergraduates at Columbia University, empowering her historically underserved students. The nature of her cutting-edge research utilizing AI gave her more concern about the rapid rate of progress in AI and the future of work for underserved communities. This led to the idea of DAA, where her combined expertise in education and AI, along with her interest in racial equity and social justice create an environment for underserved youth to blossom.

Board of directors: Dr. Christine Cain, 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 an underserved neighborhood in NYC; Dr. Ali Mostashari, DAA co-founder and CEO of LifeNome with years of experience in academia, public sector and entrepreneurship. His entrepreneurial mindset and expertise and large network of tech entrepreneurs/professionals make him a key member of our Board.

Education advisor: Dr. Sanaz Farhangi, Ph.D. in education, currently studies social change through STEM education.

Diversity: Digital Age Academy builds a diverse leadership team and appreciates and embraces different opinions, ideas, and perspectives from its team members. The current DAA team (boards of directors and advisors, project mentors and instructors, and interns) consist of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, gender, and age.

Due to the mentorship nature of our programs, we try to mimic the diversity of our students when acquiring mentors and expanding our team. We believe that our mentors play a significant role in inspiring our students through being their role models. Sharing a common background and/or race/ethnicity and gender further inspires our students and improves their self-efficacy. Almost all of the students from our last cohort identified themselves as BIPOC. In all stages of our program, we ensure the participation of female and students of color (50% female, more than 90% students of color).

We also involve different high schools, their communities, and corporations through partnerships and implement their feedback, opinions, and suggestions into our model and methods. 

Equity: At the Digital Age Academy, we ensure people from all backgrounds to have the opportunity to thrive in our workspace. 

Inclusion: We strive to create an environment that everyone feels safe, valued, respected, and appreciated. Everyone on the team including our interns have the full right to express their opinions in every aspects of the work including decision makings and are encouraged to brainstorm about pedagogical methods, business solutions, and any other matters related to the Digital Age Academy.

We would love to join a powerful network of impact-minded people who care about empowering the underserved communities through innovative digital workforce development methods to receive strategic and financial advice and improve our programs accordingly.

We currently need to 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. We hope to get support through potential partnerships 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.

We are currently running our programs in the United States. Since our digital workforce development and entrepreneurship programs are entirely online, they are open to all high school juniors and seniors from historically underserved backgrounds. However, we are currently mainly recruiting students from New York City through our partner high schools for our first year to ensure we are targeting the right students. In addition to NYC, we are also negotiating with two high schools in Maryland who might be able to join our programs this fall. 

In addition to high schools, we also partner with other US-based nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies who share similar values to us in empowering the next generation of the workforce. 

Our mentors are working-professionals who live and work in different states, including NY, CA, TX, NC, WA. This diversity will further enable us to expand our programs to other cities and states nationwide. 

Our current team includes professionals from academia and industry; all are highly data-oriented and technology experts. 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 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 corporations who share similar values with us to empower the underserved communities especially the next generation of the workforce through their corporate social responsibilities. The partnership vary on a case-by-base basis and are not limited to our suggested packages. We accept monetary partnerships as well as those providing different opportunities for our students. Our first suggestion to corporates is usually to secure internship positions for our program graduates. Considering the fact that our students acquire necessary digital and soft skills throughout our programs, we believe they can thrive in their internship positions. Another partnership package suggests recruitment of working-professional mentors from the partner company. In-kind services such as digital platforms that our students can use to further enhance their projects and startups are another way we would like to form a partnership around.

We would also love to partner with other nonprofit organizations with similar visions to further reach our audience and better serve America's youth. 

In addition, we plan to partner with more high schools in underserved neighborhoods around the US to recruit the right audience (high school juniors and seniors from underserved communities).