Dell Education Challenge Pushes College Students To Improve K-12

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 06/24/13

Dell is running its second Education Challenge, which will be awarding $30,000 in cash prizes as well as mentoring to university and college students who have workable ideas for improving the education experience for K-12 students. The announcement came during the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education, taking place this week in San Antonio, TX.

The competition, an outgrowth of the company's Social Innovation Challenge, will encourage young people to develop ideas that will specifically benefit elementary and secondary school students. Dell anticipates seeing a number of entries address personalization of learning.

Last year's Education Challenge generated 400 projects for consideration. The top winner, Forward Tutoring, came up with an idea for providing high school students free one-on-one online tutoring through the Web; students "pay forward" the value of their tutoring by doing volunteer work in their communities. The team of seven that developed Forward Tutoring came up with the idea during high school. The prize from Dell included $10,000 and access to a community of experts that could provide feedback and mentoring to turn the idea into a live site. The site now exists in beta form online.

Dell said 20 semi-finalists would be selected in October. Those teams will be able to further develop their ideas under the guidance of "certified mentors," people with entrepreneurial and business experience. In November three finalists will be chosen. A member from each of those three teams will attend an awards event in December for a final pitch.

The first deadline is Sept. 23, 2013 for entrants to register online and post project submissions. The competition is free to enter.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • laptop on a clean desk with digital padlock icon on the screen

    Data Privacy a Top Concern as Orgs Scale Up AI Agents

    As organizations race to integrate AI agents into their cloud operations and workflows, they face a crucial reality: while enthusiasm is high, major adoption barriers remain, according to a new Cloudera report. Chief among them is the challenge of safeguarding sensitive data.

  • chart with ascending bars and two silhouetted figures observing it, set against a light background with blue and purple tones

    Report: Enterprises Are Embracing Agentic AI

    According to a new report from SnapLogic, 50% of enterprises are already deploying AI agents, and another 32% plan to do so within the next 12 months..

  • stacks of glowing digital documents with circuit patterns and data streams

    Mistral AI Intros Advanced AI-Powered OCR

    French AI startup Mistral AI has announced Mistral OCR, an advanced optical character recognition (OCR) API designed to convert printed and scanned documents into digital files with "unprecedented accuracy."

  • student using a tablet with math symbols dissolving into a glowing AI

    Survey: Students Say AI Use Can Reduce Math Anxiety

    In a recent survey, 56% of high school students said that the use of artificial intelligence can go a long way toward reducing math anxiety.