The Global Problem Bank Initiative

Our model provides authentic opportunities for young people around the world to learn problem solving skills, develop agency, and become empowered 21st century “changemakers”. Working with community members, students co-create public repositories of authentic problems called “Problem Banks” and share problems, solutions, and approaches with other students around the world.

In a world where many educational systems continue to emphasize rote learning, low-level cognitive skills, and standardized test preparation, our team's initiative aims to provide students with opportunities to collaborate with community members to create “problem banks” of authentic problems in need of solutions, collaborate with partners near and far on the creation and implementation of effective solutions, learn powerful new technological and problem solving skills, develop empathy, and in the process become engaged and empowered changemakers in their communities and world.

The Global Problem Bank Initiative has grown out of the extremely successful 3D Design Problem Bank program at Brookwood School, Manchester,  MA. In the same way that this original vision has inspired other schools to set up their own problem banks, and has morphed into a powerful Teen/Seniors design program in which students create assistive devices with and for seniors, we seek to apply this same model of student/community engagement, empowerment, and agency to a variety of educational settings in order to help prepare young people for whatever future is out there for them, regardless of their background.

We seek to scale the tangible benefits seen in the Brookwood 3D Problem Bank to students in schools around the world. In the pilot, students from six diverse schools will work with community members to find problems, create individual and a pooled Problem Bank, develop and share solution ideas and implementation plans with each other, and use this work to form collaborative relationships. We aim to gather as much data from this pilot in order to effectively grow this program in year two to include thirty six education programs from a wide spectrum of countries, cultures, and socioeconomic settings.

Measurement tools (reflective journals, questionnaires, interviews, etc.) created and used to analyze changes from pre- to post-pilot in the following student areas: agency, engagement, problem solving skills, and "changemaker" mindset. - GPBI Pilot successfully implemented in six schools. Each school creates a respective problem bank, works with community partners to populate with problems, creates, and implements solutions, and students show improvements in problem solving abilities.

Track the interactions between students at six difference sites and measure changes from pre- to post-pilot in students' global perspective, problem solving approaches, and engagement. - Students from each of the six pilot schools collaborate with students from other pilot schools, developing relationships, improving problem solving abilities, and seeing different perspectives.

Measurement tools used to analyze changes from pre- to post-growth period in student agency, engagement, problem solving skills, and "changemaker" mindset in each "group of six". - Educators from each pilot site create and mentor a new group of six schools, replicating the pilot in a total of thirty six new educational settings.

Our GPBI initiative is unique in that it mobilizes diverse global communities to work with their young people to find authentic problems in need of solutions, encourages students to find immediate, community, and global partners to create and implement solutions, and facilitates the learning of new technology skills by providing students with real world opportunities to acquire and apply them. We then leverage young people’s interest and involvement in solving problems to promote collaborations between students in different parts of the world, using student agency to sow the seeds for a generation of “change makers” along the way.

The GPBI centers around students solving human centered problems in their lives, communities, and world. Our belief is that by providing young people with experiences working with members of their community to find and solve problems we will be positioning them to confront the challenges they and their communities will face in the future. The genesis of this initiative involved students 3D printing solutions for others in their lives, but we see incredible potential to leverage this model to teach young people a wide variety of high-, low-, and no-tech tools and approaches while creating agency along the way.

The “Problem Bank” concept was initially developed to allow young people to create solutions using powerful technologies such as 3D printing. Evidence indicates this same Problem Bank approach could be used in any educational setting to help young people develop agency and learn a wide spectrum of no-, low-, and high-tech skills. Our model is highly affordable and accessible, requiring only an excellent problem solving education, committed mentors, and authentic problems on which to practice, the ultimate goal being the teaching of increasingly sophisticated problems solving tools and strategies and global relationship building patterned after Brookwood School's Global Awareness Project

We have assembled an experienced and deeply connected team who, in addition to bringing a wealth of experience and diverse perspectives, work for organizations (Digital Promise, World Leadership School, the Buck Institute for Education, Ultimaker, Autodesk, MIT, AB3D ) who collaborate directly with a variety of educational organizations that are already committed to the Problem Bank model and are willing to participate in our initial pilot and a growth oriented scaling of our model. Additionally, the Problem Bank concept is a proven “attention getter”, having generated interest and garnered considerable positive press, culminating in the winning in 2017 of an Infosys InfyMaker Award of $10,000, which will provide the seed money needed to launch our pilot. Following our pilot, it is the GPBI Team’s intent to seek further funding from interested and invested donors to scale our project from 6 to 36 sites and beyond.

There are a number of assumptions upon which our GPBI model is predicated that could provide challenges as we pilot, grow, and scale. One is that our initiative is based on a “high tech” model (involving primarily 3D printing) and field tested in a very specific setting (American independent school.) Although we feel the approach is highly transferable, and the goal of our pilot is to explore the necessary factors needed to adapt this model to low- and middle- income settings around the globe, it is still important to acknowledge this as yet unproven aspect of our approach.

http://designproblembank.weebly.com/

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Our team members and advisors have seen first hand the profound impact that providing students with opportunities to connect their learning to real life situations and apply skills, concepts, and knowledge they have learned to solve authentic problems can have. This work, however, remains siloed in (often) relatively affluent and developed educational settings. By sharing our team’s successes with this approach and our vision for using a limited pilot to work out the bugs inherent in broadening this work and then collaborating with Solve to scale this work, we feel we have the potential to create something truly transformative.

Our team members and advisors come from educational organizations (including Digital Promise, World Leadership School, the Buck Institute for Education, Ultimaker, Autodesk, MIT, African Born 3D) that lead the world in exploring what works in education. Although these organizations are not formal partners, their work directly informs our proposal.

We have no “competitors” - just potential collaborators with whom we have not yet worked.