Innovate to Mitigate: A Crowdsourced Carbon Challenge

该项目正在设计和实施一项面向13-18岁年轻人的众包开放式创新挑战，以减少温室气体的排放。该项目的目标是探索该挑战在多大程度上能够成功地吸引、吸引和激励青少年参与者在科学、技术和工程学科领域进行持续而有意义的科学探索。目前正在积极开展温室气体减排前沿研究的领域包括生物学（光合作用或光合作用固碳的仿生学）和化学（用于光伏发电的硅化学、用于化石燃料脱碳的碳化学）。参与者以2-5人的小组合作，参与这些领域的基础科学，并熟练运用科学思想，原则和证据来解决设计问题，同时考虑到可能的意外影响。他们根据科学知识、学生提供的证据来源、优先标准和权衡考虑来完善他们的解决方案。一个交互式项目网站描述了挑战的规范，并提供了支持严谨性的规则。它包括一个相关科学资源库，以及描述当前缓解方面前沿科学突破的热门文章链接。目前从事缓解项目工作的研究生可提供在线指导。社交网络工具用于支持团队和导师协作解决科学问题。如果团队在应对挑战时需要帮助，他们可以在线向专家科学家和工程师小组提问。在挑战结束时，团队将在虚拟会议中展示和评论多媒体报告，并为优秀者提供奖励。将开放式创新挑战用于教育，为深度学习和创造性创新提供了一个变革性的环境，同时解决了一个对社会至关重要的问题。研究人员研究了这种学习环境如何提高参与者的学习和参与度。这种方法超越了目前在科学和教育机构中存在的非正式/正式界限，研究结果与正式和非正式环境中的许多研究和设计领域有关。新出现的证据表明，开放式创新挑战往往是由那些没有展现出人们可能期望的那种知识、技能或学科背景的参与者成功解决的。此外，求解者的多样性越大，挑战解决方案的创新性也越大。因此，预计自由选择的学习环境、挑战的性质、激励措施和对合作的支持将激发来自服务不足的学生群体的有前途的年轻参与者的成功，并在考虑到团队多样性的情况下产生应对挑战的创新解决方案。

This project is designing and conducting a crowd-sourced open innovation challenge to young people of ages 13-18 to mitigate levels of greenhouse gases. The goal of the project is to explore the extent to which the challenge will successfully attract, engage and motivate teen participants to conduct sustained and meaningful scientific inquiry across science, technology and engineering disciplines. Areas in which active cutting edge research on greenhouse gas mitigation is currently taking place include, among others, biology (photosynthesis, or biomimicry of photosynthesis to sequester carbon) and chemistry (silicon chemistry for photovoltaics, carbon chemistry for decarbonization of fossil fuels). Collaborating in teams of 2-5, participants engage with the basic science in these areas, and become skilled at applying scientific ideas, principles, and evidence to solve a design problem, while taking into account possible unanticipated effects. They refine their solutions based on scientific knowledge, student-generated sources of evidence, prioritized criteria, and tradeoff considerations. An interactive project website describes specifications for the challenge and provides rubrics to support rigor. It includes a library of relevant scientific resources, and, for inspiration, links to popular articles describing current cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs in mitigation. Graduate students recruited for their current work on mitigation projects provide online mentoring. Social networking tools are used to support teams and mentors in collaborative scientific problem-solving. If teams need help while working on their challenges, they are able to ask questions of a panel of expert scientists and engineers who are available online. At the end of the challenge, teams present and critique multimedia reports in a virtual conference, and the project provides awards for excellence. The use of open innovation challenges for education provides a vision of a transformative setting for deep learning and creative innovation that at the same time addresses a problem of critical importance to society. Researchers study how this learning environment improves learning and engagement among participants. This approach transcends the informal/formal boundaries that currently exist, both in scientific and educational institutions, and findings are relevant to many areas of research and design in both formal and informal settings. Emerging evidence suggests that open innovation challenges are often successfully solved by participants who do not exhibit the kinds of knowledge, skill or disciplinary background one might expect. In addition, the greater the diversity of solvers is, the greater the innovativeness of challenge solutions tends to be. Therefore, it is expected that the free choice learning environment, the nature of the challenge, the incentives, and the support for collaboration will inspire the success of promising young participants from underserved student populations, as well as resulting in innovative solutions to the challenge given the diversity of teams.