ASE Innovate
Problem: ASE aims to convert climate activism into action by teaching underused teenage brains to create innovations that solve local problems in underserved communities like pollution and transit that can lead to global scalable sustainability solutions. The brains of adolescents, while receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval, is also more sensitive to social justice and autonomy.
Solution: The ASE Innovate Pilot impacts communities by training middle-school students on invention, entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability, mentorship from local government’s and USPTO. ASE students create sustainable inventions, compete at competitions and invent their financial freedom. Impact: With huge K-12 budget deficits, it is external programs like ASE that can help a whole generation of young innovators in underserved schools succeed in their academic lives and build great futures. In solving local problems through sustainable innovations, ASE students end up creating solutions that can scale globally.
Scale and Statistics: ASE aims to address the underutilization of the teenage, Gen-Z brain. Student activism for Climate Change and consequential inspirations like the Greta Effect, show huge promise for an untapped resource - the grit of a teenager. ``87% of Gen Z-ers are worried about the environment and feel personally responsible to make a difference. 41% plan to become entrepreneurs and 50% believe they'll invent something that changes the world”. ASE accelerates opportunities for marginalized students through its transformative four-track programming on environmental sustainability, invention, entrepreneurship and pitch-ready.
Contributing Factors: The district now has a budget deficit of $47.8M resulting in huge layoffs and program cuts. It is external agencies like ASE that can provide transformational change not just through STEM and entrepreneurship education but can serve as an agent of social justice and elevate the economic strata of the community through better college and career prospects. Adolescents in the underserved community lack inspiring programming and tinkering opportunities to address local problems beyond activism.
Needs Assessment: ASE beachheads in school district of 14292 students, with 70% from low-income families. ASE research indicated that teenagers lack real-life science education, hands-on invention/entrepreneurial opportunities to address issues they are passionate about and are growing up in a world of political and environmental pessimism.
Solution & Implementation: ASE pilots as an after-school club at Korematsu middle school with 57.8% students identified as low income families. ASE pilot curriculum is developed with community, scholarly and student feedback. The four-track ASE Pilot trains students on environmental sustainability, invention, entrepreneurship and being pitch-ready to compete at invention conventions/startup competitions. ASE tagline “Make new mistakes” teaches students to fail fast, creating a generation of creative problem solvers.
Results: Students indicated higher engagement in ASE classes compared to core-school because they saw relevance in learning sustainability, application when learning engineering, and enjoyed creative freedom inventing. Students labelled as disruptive or low achieving are inventing transformative solutions. One team is addressing urban mobility through student developed bamboo scooters. Students consistently show up 10 minutes early to ASE classes. Immigrant parents reached out with Google translated text indicating profound gratitude for ASE programming. The Principal is keen on scaling ASE school wide next year.
ASE Culture: As a not for profit that serves a school, ASE operates with a startup culture within a school. In the last three months since its formation, ASE set up pilots with successful outcomes, established partnerships and is poised for scale. The efficiency in ASE’s lean operations is primarily because of the field research that went into understanding the problem ASE set out to solve. Changing the K-12 system outside of regulations may not be possible, but ASE found a way to work with in the K-12 system and fix the broken system, one brick (school) at a time.
Services: ASE is operationalizing two pilot methods - students belong to the ASE after-school club at one pilot site (1.2 hours/week) and at another pilot students get in classroom instruction (1 hour/week). ASE’s mantra for students is “make new mistakes”, a philosophy targeted at perseverance, acceptance of failures, while building passion and grit. ASE staff practice what they preach in developing the ASE curriculum in an Agile manner with fast prototyping.
Program: Students are taught aspects of entrepreneurship and business communication in an experiential manner. Students learn about sustainability through an inquiry based approach like calculating their ecological footprint and earth overshoot day. Through its transformative programming by tapping into student’s innate curiosity, tinkering mindset and providing avenues for hands-on exploration opportunities to address local problems that students choose work on.
Partnerships: ASE partners with other leading K-12 business and entrepreneurship education (NFTE and Junior Achievement), and intellectual property agencies ( USPTO) to create a cohesive ASE curriculum that blends all requisite knowledge needed for a student inventor to take his/her invention to market and production.
Processes and Technology: Instruction also happens through a flipped classroom model where the learning material is made available to students through google classrooms for self paced learning. During the weekly ASE club meetings, the ASE educator facilitates hands on projects and inquiry based deep thinking and coaches students through their invention journey.
Mentorship: ASE partnered with the city of El Cerrito to educate students on local sustainable problems that could be addressed through inventions or technological advances. ASE students are paired with industry/business mentors to think through the problems they are working on.
Field Trips: ASE students have field trips to the Fab lab (for fabricating student inventions) and the state of the art recycle center to inspire sustainable inventions.
- Support underserved people in fostering entrepreneurship and creating new technologies, businesses, and jobs
- Prototype