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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.

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