Challenge context
Online Education
Equity & Diversity
Equity & Diversity
COVID-19 has disrupted the ‘traditional’ delivery of education and provided us with an opportunity to re-imagine the future of education to ensure no child is left behind, rather than returning to the familiar systems of the ‘old normal’.
Digital learning provides opportunities for increased engagement, personalisation, authenticity but there are different pathways to choose or blend. Traditional synchronous learning (ie a teacher live on Zoom) offers opportunities for bespoke guidance and a human interaction but can be difficult to manage and hard to scale-up. Asynchronous learning (ie pre-recorded teaching) provides new chances for inclusivity, flexibility, and optionality but comes with issues concerning engagement and feedback.
Equity & Diversity
Equity & Diversity
Equity & Diversity
The rapid nature of the shift to digital learning meant a proper investment strategy for investment and roll-out of devices, broadband, and digital literacy was often not achieved by educators in time. Whilst digital learning has been a success for some, other members of society have been further marginalised due to lack of access. For digital learning to be a success, the barriers to learning must be reduced.
Digital technologies allow education to be more flexible, interactive, and personalised, thus giving a greater voice to those students previously excluded. Education is intended to be a great equaliser, not leave people behind. We need to be careful that technologies which intend to address equality don’t instead continue to perpetuate the same divisions.
Digital Wellness
Digital Wellness
Digital Wellness
With the transition to digital learning, students now spend an unprecedented amount of time engaging with technology and the internet. The skills learnt through this engagement will help the development of their digital skillset for enabling them to have the best future opportunities by embracing modern ways of working.
For safeguarding practitioners, the overnight exposure to increased digital technologies poses issues about students’ wellbeing and safety. Therefore, strategy and leadership will be key to offering better educational opportunities whilst promoting a healthy, safe, and secure use of technology.
Mental Health
Digital Wellness
Digital Wellness
The unforeseen overnight shift to digital learning has given an unprecedented insight into the effects of this new way of working on students’ health and wellbeing.
Combined with lockdown living, concerns have been raised over the effects of digital learning on students’ feelings of isolation, motivation, and anxiety. However, some students that previously felt uncomfortable in school have reported greater participation as digital learning partly removes opportunities for social anxiety and offers increased accessibility.
Previous challenges
HACK 4 CHILD MENTAL HEALTH 2019 - April 26-28 - Toronto, Canada
We proudly hosted our 2nd annual #Hack4ChildMentalHealth event to enable a platform to develop innovative solutions that would address child and youth mental health issues. Taking the form of a hackathon and datathon, the aim was to have teams use data and technology to develop innovative solutions that address awareness, early detection, prevention, intervention and treatment opportunities for children and youth mental health issues.
The event kicked off with presentations by leaders in their respective mental health fields and a panel Q&A to provide greater context and insights on the Problem Statement for the participants. 12 teams representing 59 participants (over 50% of which were female) then had three days to develop viable solutions, receiving on-going support from our mentors.
Each team was then given 8 minutes to pitch their solution to our expert panel of judges, who assessed each one following this criteria. The top three teams received prizes for their solutions ($5000, $3500, $2500 respectively), thanks to the generous donations by our sponsors.
The solutions developed addressed a wide cross-section of challenges and opportunities around child and youth mental health issues, including: more streamlined approaches to patient screening processes; tools to promote better ‘at home’ treatment exercises; data models to predict with a higher degree of certainty which cases are likely to be reopened; and agile resources for caregivers of autism patients.
For more information, please see our Executive Summary of the event here.
HACK 4 INTEGRITY 2019 - February 17-20 - Kabul, Afghanistan. In partnership with UNDP Afghanistan.
Corruption is a major issue for Afghanistan, so we partnered with UNDP to host a three-day hackathon in Kabul to develop solutions which help combat this issue.
19 teams took part, identifying and developing innovative applications to drive key anti-corruption initiatives. The winning solution proposed to tackle corruption within private universities where corruption is historically rife (with an estimated 20,000 ‘ghost students’) due to paper-based admin systems making audit and control difficult. The team designed a web-based credentialing and validation system to remove any scope for corruption by securing all data.
$30,000 was distributed amongst the winning teams by the UNDP in the form of grants, to continue development of their solutions. Winning teams were also given access to furthering mentoring and expert advice to ensure the full development and sustainability of their solutions.
For more information, please read the UNDP summary article here.
HACK 4 CHILD MENTAL HEALTH 2018 - May 11-13 - Toronto, Canada
Our inaugural hackathon aimed to develop innovative solutions that address awareness, early detection, prevention, intervention and treatment opportunities for children and youth mental health issues
For the kick-off, presentations were made by leaders in their respective mental health fields to provide greater context on the Problem Statement for the participants. 11 teams (totalling 73 participants) then formulated the specific use cases they’d solution against, before spending 3 days developing out their solutions, aided by our mentors.
Teams then had 5-minutes to pitch their solutions to our panel of judges representing clinical, academic, entrepreneurial, and technology industry sectors. The top three teams were rewarded with prize money (of $7500 and $5000) by our generous sponsors.
The solutions developed addressed a wide cross-section of challenges and opportunities around child and youth mental health issues, including: improving access to and quality of knowledge and support tools; increasing collaboration within and between the practitioners and their patients; developing platforms to collect, analyse, and disseminate data; encouraging earlier detection, dialogue, positive behaviour and support among affected parties through incentive-based Apps; and reducing the stigma associated with Mental Illness.
For more information, please see our Executive Summary of the event here.
