What is the name of your organization?
OpenImpact Lab
What is the name of your solution?
OpenImpact Lab
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A web platform that incentivizes students to complete real public-posted NGO impacts with 24/7 AI guided and evaluation system
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
United States
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The challenge is that "students don't enjoy to learn in education institutions."
The members of the team have lived in Taiwan, Japan, UK, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and US. One fact we commonly learned is that students learned and grow the most when two conditions are met: 1) learning by doing projects that generate impacts and social recognitions, and 2) a strong motivation to solve the problem. It's human nature. We want to be recognized by people whom we care.
The team lead oversees his department's learning and teaching activities(HKPolyU, QS 57, 2025), he witnesses many students lack the passion to learn. What does not help is that many teachers still practice a traditional direct lecturing style. This, we believe, is a global challenge because the current higher education system was established in the industrial revolution time, when the graduates were expected to follow instructions.
Even worse, the "rigorous" auditing process can easily threaten the young faculty member to be innovative and gradually digest the passion.
Clearly, the current graduates do not meet the requirements of industrial need. The numbers are: 1) The employer reputation is only 35.6% (HKPolyU), and globally, 87% of employers report shortages in AI fluency and problem-solving.
What is your solution?
Our solution is a platform.
A platform that is outside of the education institution (so that it can freely change without bureaucratic regulations).
A platform that solicits real projects from NGO.
A platform that uses fine-tuned GenAI models to comprehend the challenges of the NGO projects and decompose the projects into subtasks with a labelled difficulty and expected learning outcomes.
A platform that allows students to enroll in real NGO projects and provides a 24/7 AI tutor (which is tuned as professional educators) to interact with, brainstorm with, and guide students.
A platform empowered by an AI Agent to evaluate and approve students' work and sent to the NGO for their confirmation and comments.
Everything in just one web/mobile app platform.
To make this platform a ultimate success, it MUST provides incentives to students. Three incentives are planned: 1) Volunteer certificate that shows students completed the projects with social impact (provided by NGO), 2) Building their Github Portfolio which demonstrates exactly what employers want, 3) small amount of the financial incentive provided by NGO.
Check out our prototype below.
Demo video: https://youtu.be/Suq3baANy-w
Website: https://www.openimpactlab.org/
Platform: https://www.learn.openimpactlab.org/
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Two major beneficiaries.
1. Everyone who wants to learn via a real project (our definition of "students");
Let's be honest. Not everyone knows what they want to do in the first place. We all need an opportunity to try projects that "seem" interesting to us. Of course, students can randomly try something online. But wouldn't it be much more interesting if the projects that allowed students to try are really something needed by someone!? Students are underserved by these kinds of opportunities. Our platform connects students with NGOs with different missions and purposes. Students can work for what they care about he/she most and enjoy a sense of satisfaction when they complete the project and learned the impact they made. They will be motivated to learn and complete another project because the enjoyment of serving others is addictive :)
2. NGOs with limited resources to recruit many full-time employees to handle non-recurrent (one-off) projects.
NGOs usually have limited resources, which hinders their success. NGO needs hands to deliver solutions that can facilitate their operation. These solutions (good to have) are less urgent and have fewer risks if the solutions are not robust and optimized.
NGO and students are a perfect match.
