AI at the grassroots

Tara Chklovski is CEO and founder of global tech education nonprofit Technovation. Technovation empowers underserved communities (especially women and girls) to tackle community problems using cutting-edge technologies (mobile and AI). Prominently featured in the award-winning documentary Codegirl, Forbes named Chklovski “the pioneer empowering the incredible tech girls of the future” for her work encouraging the next generation of innovators and problem solvers. A STEM education advocate, she led the 2019 education track at the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit, presenting Technovation's findings at SXSW EDU, UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week, Mobile World Congress L.A., the International Joint Conference on AI, and the Global Partnership on AI for Humanity convened by the French Government. Since its founding in 2006, Technovation has engaged more than 160,000 children, parents, mentors, and educators in its mobile and AI programs in 100+ countries.

Technology can help solve large-scale, complex problems. In the past 20 years, engineering and tech innovations have drastically changed how we live and work. But in this process of technological advancement, some groups are left behind.

1. Technovation’s goal is to help underserved communities build a sense of efficacy as technology inventors and leaders, eventually leading to greater community resilience. 

1. To achieve this, we propose to engage and train ~20,000 parents and mentors  to support ~55,000 underserved girls in an AI-entrepreneurship, 12-week program. 

2. To make changes that will elevate the human condition, we need everyone, not just technology experts, to engage as empowered global citizens. More people need to believe that they can effect change in their lives and communities, and that they can learn how to use powerful technologies, such as AI, to make this positive change.

Technological advances are shaping the 21st century while leaving out vulnerable groups, the largest of which are the women. In 2019, 3.6 billion people were unconnected to the Internet. Only 48% of all women were using the Internet - most of whom are in developed countries. In least developed countries (LDCs) only 14% of women were online. 

But this problem is wickedly pervasive. There is no place in the world that has gender equality, and the problem is worse in areas where individuals have influence and impact - such as technology and entrepreneurship. 

The speed, scale, and top-down nature of AI in particular, requires a deliberate counter-approach empowering vulnerable groups to not just be users or victims, but creators of these technologies.

Through our experience, we’ve found that the issue is beyond that of access. Even in developed countries, the number of women in technology is less than 20% and in entrepreneurship, less than 10%. Mindset, motivation and retention are critical factors in sustaining the involvement of girls and women as leaders, entrepreneurs and technology innovators. 

We use Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy research as a framework to address factors that change participants’ mindset and persistence: exposure, experience, expectations, emotion, and energy.

The 40 modules in our 12-week/60-hour online program equip learners with technical knowledge, skills and confidence to develop solutions to tackle real-world problems using mobile and AI technology. Modules include Problem Identification, Design Thinking, Identifying Behavioral Barriers to Product Adoption, Datasets, Machine Learning, Training models on image recognition, text and numeral recognition, Responsible AI, Mobile App development, Creating a Business Plan, Revenue Models and Pitch Videos.

Our participants, usually girls aged 8-18 and their families, are able to apply their new tech skills to address pressing problems in their communities, such as climate change, domestic abuse, and most recently, COVID-19. Mentors from leading tech companies and academia, such as Google, MIT, CMU and Stanford, support the girls and their families in developing their AI and mobile apps.

The participants pitch their solutions to the whole Technovation community at a two-day Technovation World Summit. It is also at the Summit where participants from around the world come together to share their ideas publicly, and learn from one another’s experiences and ideas.

Following the program, participants are invited to join the Technovation alumni community where they continue deepening their technology and entrepreneurship skills through continued access to resources and learning opportunities.

In line with our aim to empower vulnerable groups as creators of cutting-edge technologies, 70% of our participants come from under-resourced communities across 100+ countries. By providing a challenge-based technology (and engineering) education curriculum for girls 8-18 years old and their families, we develop problem solving skills, build their self-efficacy and expand their capabilities to match current and future workforce needs. Annually 50,000 participants register for Technovation and 35% complete the 10-12 week programs (60-100 hours).

We measure success by an increase in resources, voice, influence, agency and achievements: 

• Resources: Access to material, human, and social resources 

• Agency: Abilities, participation, voice, and influence in the family, workplace, school, community

• Achievements: Improvements in well-being and life outcomes that result from increasing agency and cognitive skills (Kabeer, 1999).

To help us better understand and meet learners’ needs, we work closely with about 100 Technovation Regional Ambassadors who recruit and engage students and mentors in their countries. To ensure we are adequately and appropriately supporting participants during this pandemic, we have set up our Global Task Force of 70+ experts and stakeholders from around the world to share challenges, effective practices, and to identify concrete, online/blended education pilots that can be implemented immediately.

Empowering underserved communities, especially girls and women, to develop the mindset and skills to tackle local problems with cutting-edge technologies requires a deep understanding of: human behavior, how novices and experts learn, how societies drive change and innovation, behavioral barriers to change, as well as understanding how best to motivate individuals over a long and challenging entrepreneurial journey. We need to develop this level of understanding if we are to equip young people, especially girls, to be able to tackle complex problems that they will face as adults. The Technovation project aims to further and elevate this understanding. 

Technovation (then Iridescent) was born in 2006 out of my experience as an aerospace engineering graduate student at USC. I looked around the classroom and realized how few women and people of color there were in my class. For many years I had worked hard to get to this point, but there was now a larger question pulling at me. I started Technovation (Iridescent) determined to get more underrepresented groups into science, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Technovation’s first program, Family Science, began in 2007. From one school in Los Angeles, it expanded to San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Florida. Technovation Girls launched in 2010 to help address the gender gap in technology. The programs went global in 2013. In 2018, we launched our first AI challenge for Families across 13 countries.

Our work is constantly evolving and we are now improving support systems and resources for parents and virtual mentors to better support children learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through it all, the Technovation team never lost sight of the goal I set out to achieve 14 years ago: to empower underserved young people to lead and inspire - by using incredible technologies to accomplish incredible things.

I had a childhood that was not usual for girls in India. My parents told me I could do anything, be anything - even things that were “not for girls”. Planes fascinated me, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot. When that did not work out, I turned to building planes, becoming an engineer instead.

Eventually I moved to the United States where I saw low-income communities in a different way than in India. I experienced gender inequality, being the only woman in an aerospace company and one of the few women in my aerospace engineering PhD program, and realized I had a deeper calling. I decided to stop my PhD and focus on empowering young people, especially girls, to develop the mindset and skills to change the world - with technology. 

I wanted to build something impactful, scalable, and world changing. I did not necessarily set out to create a nonprofit. I was looking for a solution that worked and could grow to improve the lives of thousands of under-resourced people.

The big picture is not that these young women become engineers, but that they develop the mindset that they can become problem-solvers using technology.

It is 2020, and there is no place in the world with gender equality (UN HDR 2019). Such a deeply entrenched, complex problem requires special solutions and leaders. 

Here is what enables us to deliver:

My experience as a girl in India (21+ years) ensures that I never take personal safety, freedom of thought, decision and action for granted. This motivates me everyday to wake up and drive change.

My engineering and academic background enable me to absorb and process vast amounts of data and research. Annually I read ~300 research papers and 30+ work-related books. 

My father was an Airforce pilot and my mother was an Army doctor. I thrive on discipline, focus and pushing past pain. I run marathons and have a second degree black belt in taekwondo. I do not give up. 

The problem is hard, and there are many short-term solutions that flash and die out. My goal is to truly increase the resources, voice, influence, agency and achievements of under-resourced youth and girls, to change their life trajectories for the better. This requires a long-term vision and persistence.

I have been running Technovation for more than 14 years and have learned a lot about myself. I know when I get frustrated, what motivates me, what drains me, and what helps me persist. The problem is intellectually complex, and we are making progress to keep everyone motivated. But we need to do more. This is and will continue to be - my life’s work.

Starting, running, and globally scaling up a nonprofit is not easy. I started Technovation without funding, connections, network, experience. Nobody would fund us initially - we had no track record. I applied for National Science Foundation funding each year for 3 years. I was a novice and took 300 hours to fill out the application. We won our first grant for $1 million in year 4. 

The following year we were awarded $7 million from the US Navy to scale across the US. That ended due to policy changes. We had to find a new multi-million dollar funder. Usually nonprofits die when a single, large funding source evaporates. But my team and I worked intensely over a year to shift our model from engaging universities to corporations, to secure corporate funding and survive without laying off anyone. 

Scaling globally means that we are rejected at every step. No one major example of adversity stands out; rather it is hard to imagine a period when we weren’t battling headwinds, particularly now in the time of COVID-19. These times call for a wartime CEO. I still have not experienced peacetime.

I recently brought 70 leaders from 55 organizations and 25 countries in the Global Online Education Task Force -  to share best practices in online learning during COVID, while rapidly deploying pilots to move the field forward. 

The 1hr, 15 min meeting was designed to elicit best practices and innovative ideas in the most effective manner. Participants were invited to write responses to prompts in shared slides, which were summarized in this overview document and used to deploy a rapid pilot with UNESCO within the space of a month. The task force aims to build capacity in parents, mentors and educators across the world, to help under-resourced students, especially girls to not just reduce learning losses due to COVID-19, but to enable them to actively contribute their voice and perspective. 

The diversity, agility and effectiveness of this task force were made possible by the 14 year base of experience, network and credibility that we have built with partners globally, and that now uniquely positions us to fill a gap and make an impact. 

Online learning, from home, supported by parents and mentors is a challenge that everyone is dealing with, and we have valuable experience to bring to the table.

There is no other program that equips underserved communities to tackle local problems with technologies such as AI, at global scale.

Here are elements that make our model innovative.

Scalable - Having a broad challenge - “find a problem in your community that you want to help solve” - enables our curriculum to be locally relevant to participants worldwide, despite cultural and socio-economic differences. 

Parental Engagement - We build AI capacity at the grassroots level, supporting not only students but also their parents as co-learners and changemakers. Parents learn about technology entrepreneurship, about themselves as lifelong learners, while also modeling these traits for their children.

Complex systems thinking - Our real-world problem solving model includes a rigorous project-based, complex systems thinking curriculum for middle and high school students that builds critical 21st century skills (as outlined by the WEF). Each year participants create technology-based solutions that tackle complex issues of gender-based violence, racial bias, police brutality, child marriage in innovative ways. We continuously improve our curriculum to enable them to make more effective and responsible technological solutions for such complex problems. 

Global mentor engagement - We also support our learners by engaging and training a global network of mentors with expertise in tech and related fields. Mentors commit to supporting participants over 12 weeks because they learn valuable skills of technology/AI entrepreneurship, rapid prototyping, leadership and mentoring.

Technovation’s model is the only one that builds capacity at multiple levels, bringing together parents, families, educators and mentors to support students.

Our theory of change is that children, supported by their parents and mentors, can develop complex systems thinking and real-world problem-solving skills by engaging in high-dosage, project-based competitions. 

The top three skills needed in 2025, according to the World Economic Forum, are cognitive abilities, systems skills and complex problem-solving. We need to move beyond the traditional “command and control” approach that merely increases the speed with which students develop literacy and numeracy skills (Gunderson and Holling, 2001). Content knowledge skills are relatively easy to learn, standardize, and measure, but they are also easy to automate. As Stuart Elliott points out, “current math and data analysis systems outperform nearly all workers” (Elliott, S., 2017).

By providing challenge-based technology (and engineering) education curriculum for children and their parents, we aim to develop problem-solving skills, tech skills, and confidence in learning abilities. In doing so, we empower underserved communities with 21st century skills to create solutions to community issues. 

In studying the impact and evaluations of our program for the past 14 years, we have found that providing high-dosage, multi-week programs enables learners to move from “situational interest” (i.e. participating in a program because it is offered conveniently) - to “well-developed, individual interest” (i.e one where the activity becomes a core part of their identity) (Hidi S., Renninger K.A., 2006).

Our main strategies involve: 

1) increasing access to (improved) resources, software platforms, curriculum, training, support; 

2) providing continuing learning opportunities, and 

3) cultivating co-learning environments involving parents, mentors, community leaders and Technovation alumni.

Our online modules and activities are designed to produce an increased sense of agency and achievement, increase in technical skills, and an increase in leadership skills.

The program aims to address participation and psychological barriers by increasing access to social capital (mentors and alumni), fun and relevant curriculum and learning experiences, and by providing regular encouragement.

We measure program reach in three ways:

• Participants who view our AI/mobile entrepreneurship curriculum (1 million/year currently)

• Participants who register for our programs (50,000/year currently)

• Participants who finish the full 12-week curriculum (22,000/year currently). 91% of our students increase their sense of self-efficacy as problem solvers, and our alumni build the confidence and skills to be TED speakers and hold technical positions at organizations like Amazon and Facebook.

Due to COVID we saw a 50% increase in website traffic to our curriculum as it is the only free, online, project-based AI-entrepreneurship curriculum. 

However, we also saw a 15% reduction in the number of girls who could finish the full program due to lack of access to internet, technology devices at home and technical support. 

Keeping this dynamic situation in view, our strategy for the next year is to hold steady to our 1-year goal of engaging 50,000 participants to register, and to ensure 25,000 have the necessary support to complete the full program. 

We will focus on capacity building, and engage and train 5000 mentors to provide virtual mentoring and technical support to participants worldwide. We will also leverage our 53,000-strong alumni community to increase the quality and depth of support, while showcasing and celebrating their stories of success. 

Over 5 years we want to engage 230,000 participants in our programs with strong, multi-year capacity building efforts for parents, mentors, educators and alumni in each community we serve.

Over the next five years, our goal is to move beyond simply sparking interest through hour-long coding experiences. We want to focus on motivating and retaining participants so that they can create a deep, resilient impact in the communities we work in. 

We want to continue improving our curriculum and training by integrating best practices from team science, human behavior, motivation theory, complex systems thinking, and our learnings in our 14 years of operation. We aim to: 

1. identify benchmarks for collaborative, real-world problem-solving for students;

2. translate benchmarks into curricula that addresses barriers to adoption and  shift the conversation from “beyond coding” to building problem-solving capacity in underserved groups;

3. develop training for educators, mentors, and parents to engage children in these learning experiences worldwide;

4. increase our efforts to connect learners to internships, job opportunities, and feature their journeys and success stories as inspiration to our broader community. 

Technovation also hopes to use what we learn from program adjustments stemming from COVID-19 to increase participants’ resilience to future challenges from threats such as climate change and the projected economic instability resulting from COVID-19.

We are also strengthening our commitment to contribute to the global knowledge base of real-world problem solving. The improved curriculum and training resources will be freely shared with all, especially with educators and education systems to be implemented with communities worldwide - accelerating our ability to meet the UN 2030 Agenda and ensuring that all human beings have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

We face a few different types of barriers. The usual are those of infrastructure and resources (technology, internet, devices, food, safe spaces to meet etc) and that can be addressed through strategic partnerships. To build these partnerships at global scale takes patience, commitment  and sophisticated project management. Over the past 14 years we have developed just these skills as the backbone organization in collective impact work. 

The harder barriers are the behavioral barriers that sophisticated project management cannot address. 

We are in the business of changing people’s mindsets and empowering them to accomplish what they never dreamed they could accomplish. Our default tendency is to watch Netflix or TikTok, or scroll through Facebook feeds when we have access to the internet. 80% of people do not spend their time on the internet in learning and building new things. 

And thus the problem is a much harder one than just bringing a high quality curriculum and internet to under-resourced communities.

One “nudging” strategy that we admire and would like to build upon is that of sending electricity bills to homeowners that show how much more environmentally-friendly their neighbor is. 

Over the next five years we need to devote more attention to messaging, incentives and feedback mechanisms that convey the message to participants that they can do this, they will be successful at it, and that they will build valuable long-term skills for their life through this program.

We have developed a strategic plan focused on improving retention of participants through the program funnel. 

We will leverage strategic partnerships with ILO, UN ITU, IEEE and the UNESCO - Global Education Coalition to reach more educators, mentors and parents across the world to better support girls, while also building their own skills. This will enable us to have a wider funnel at the start.

The core of the work will be to work with partners such as Ideas42 (behavioral science), MIT (technical expertise), the International Labor Organization and World Bank (certification and incentives), and metacognition, motivation theory experts, conducting rapid pilots, and collecting different types of online data to better understand the decision making process of participants. 

To secure funding for multi-year experiments, we are building a pipeline of potential funding opportunities with  mission and value-aligned donors and foundations. 

Finally, we are keenly aware of how the COVID-19 crisis may affect different parts of our plans and programs and have put structures in place such as our Global Online Education Task Force to help us stay agile, informed and nimbly navigate new barriers and challenges as they arise.

Nationally, we are partnering with the Million Girls Moonshot initiative led by STEMNext. The Million Girls Moonshot project aims to engage 1 million girls in STEM learning opportunities through afterschool and summer programs over the next five years. The Moonshot will be active in out-of-school programs in all 50 states, leveraging the Mott-funded 50 State Afterschool Network, which has access to more than 10 million youth and 100,000 after school programs across the country. Parents and mentors will be invited to support the girls, and we will leverage the curriculum developed through this project to support them better. 

Technovation has also recently launched a global online education task force comprising 70+ educators, mentors, community partners, foundations, industry partners, UN agencies and researchers. We are working with hundreds of organizations worldwide to identify concrete, online/blended education pilots that can be shared with our community partners and implemented immediately. These organizations include UNESCO, ITU, XPRIZE, Google, NVIDIA, the Los Angeles Public Library, MIT, CMU, Data Science Nigeria, Bolivia Tech Hub, Somali Youth Voluntary Group Association, Dubai Cares, Pakistan Science Club, the Government of Malta, Aga Khan Foundation to name a few.

This initiative will provide capacity building training materials for parents, mentors and educators to help students develop the 21st century skills and resilience necessary to tackle other COVID-like challenges they will be facing as adults.

We have been in operation for more than 14 years, steadily growing our impact, operations and fundraising abilities. In past years we did explore monetizing our curriculum, but quickly realized that developing an earned income model required dedicating new resources and acquiring new expertise, which detracted from our mission. 

Our current model is efficient and effective as we gain mentors and volunteers from corporations in the early stages of the partnership, progressing to physical space, food, AV etc for hundreds of our events worldwide, and finally funding. We anticipate this funding model becoming more effective and efficient as the AI-technology movement gains speed, and as we continue to deepen our experience and curriculum assets. 

Nonprofits exist in the space between governments and industry - tackling complex, social problems that do not yet have defined solutions. The gender inequality issue is an example of one such problem.

Our sustainability comes from the fact that we provide valuable professional development, skill-based volunteering opportunities for industry employees - individuals who seek experiences that help them feel a sense of purpose, while learning and growing themselves.

This is even more important in COVID-times, allowing us to have a foundation of sustainability.

Adobe - 725,000

Google - 500,000
Salesforce - 500,000
HSBC - 436,868
NVIDIA - 333,650
Uber Technologies - 310,000
McGovern Foundation - 300,000
Adobe - 300,000
Gen Motors- 250,000
Elbaz Family Foundation -100,000
Oracle - 70,000

We seek  $366,669 to make curriculum and training improvements that will enable us to address behavioral barriers to program participation. 

1. Improving curriculum modules for participants (students, parents, educators and mentors) to deepen learning gains, with supporting  training materials - $50,000
2. Training and supporting educators and Regional Ambassadors worldwide - $62,500
3. Training and supporting mentors - $25,000
4. Leverage alumni as Ambassadors in their regions for the new curriculum - $12,500
5. Assessment of curriculum on participants' content knowledge, attitudes and behaviors - $12,500
6. Development and maintenance of software platforms that host the curriculum and support participant engagement with the curriculum - $95,625
7. Dissemination - connecting with national and international press, sharing impact stories and curriculum resources via social media, blogs and newsletters - $50,000
8. Indirect (insurance, liability, financial sustainability) - $58,544

EXPENSES

Salaries/Benefits - $2,157,706
Program costs - $658,576
Consultants - $288,800
Travel - $73,200
Administrative Expenses - $154,884
Rent/Office Expense - $100,036
Total Expenses - $3,433,202

We are entering our 15th year of program operation with a very clear-eyed understanding of our strengths, our weaknesses and who and what we can provide value to. 

The world needs our specific expertise on online real-world problem solving  - relevant at a time when billions of students are learning from home. We bring a decade more of experience engaging and supporting parents as co-learners, as well as virtual mentoring - also relevant in today's COVID times.

Every organization shares its DNA with the founder and we are not an exception. My strength is to build lasting programs that are research-based and I intentionally choose to spend time doing that instead of spreading the word and raising visiblity. That is why today we are not as well known as we should be. 

That is why we would like to apply for The Elevate Prize, so we can share what we have learned and what we have found to be effective in a time when so many students, parents, educators and mentors can benefit from it.

With the increased visiblity we will be able to connect with more global partners and continue increase our participation funnel.

And finally, with the increased funding, we want to invest resources in partnering with behavioral science organizations such as ideas42 that will help us address barriers to participation and retention in our programs.

We are primarily a content platform and community - bringing like-minded indivduals together to solve real-world problems.

We need to partner with community organizations - schools, libraries, NGOs to reach students, parents and educators to participate in our programs.

And we need to partner with academia and industry to bring mentors into our programs, content knowledge as well as funding.

To date we have been a grassroots organization to maintain agility. Our goal for 2020-2021 is to establish certain global and national level partnerships through each of which we can reach 5000+ participants.

We would like to partner with UNHCR and UNICEF. We will be able to provide them with capacity building training and materials and a global support community that will enable girls to become technology entrepreneurs in their communities. In return they will help us reach more under-resourced communities.

We would also like to partner with AARP as grandparents serve a critical role in communities in terms of childcare. Through our program models, we are able to help them connect better with their grandchildren, while helping the grandparents model lifelong learning.

Finally we would like to partner with the gaming industry and recruit employees as mentors as well as senior leaders as board members. We have been studying best practices from the gaming industry for decades and have a lot to learn from them in terms of developing highly engaging learning environments.