According to the Brookings Institute, “more STEM- oriented metropolitan economies perform strongly on a wide variety of economic indicators, from innovation to employment. The excessively professional definition of STEM jobs has led to missed opportunities to identify and support valuable training and career development.” Access to STEM Education and STEM-related career paths can thus lead to significant benefits for forgotten communities, particularly those who are underrepresented in tech, including African Americans, Latinos/as, and Women.
The solution for this is to create a generation of social inventors that have the ability to identify issues in their community, the confidence to address them, the tools to create products and services based on human centered design, and the support from a network of peers and mentors to successfully implement their solutions. By deploying the Trainer of Trainer model (ToT), Uncharted Power’s STEM curriculum, Think Out of Bounds (TOOB), will be taught by educators in congruence with the company’s legacy play products, an energy generating jump rope and soccer ball, which inspire children to get interested in tech, STEM, environmental protection and social innovations. TOOB uses examples of inventors from various socioeconomic and racial backgrounds and is specifically designed to build creative confidence and teach students how to invent with limited resources.
UPlift will include a hackathon that provides a platform for participants to share prototypes created after completing the TOOB curriculum to encourage sustainable and scalable impact. The program includes the implementation of social solution science fairs and induction into an alumni network of inventors that have access to a successful minority owned incubator and mentorship program. Not every student may be an inventor, but we aim to help them learn some of the tools to be inventive and the confidence to pursue any venture in any field they may desire.
It is Uncharted Power’s vision that increased presence in tech of women, people of color, and people who grew up in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas will be leading the change we seek in our communities in the years to come. Therefore, after completing the program, children all over the world will have learned about design thinking, prototyping, and social entrepreneurship as tools to solve the issues inherent to their respective communities. We believe this approach is innovative, creative, and meaningful in a way that can achieve sustainable and scalable change.
