What is the name of your organization?
Add-A-Tudez Entertainment Company (for-profit side) and Ingenium (501(c)3 educational nonprofit side)
What is the name of your solution?
Getting The STEM Game On!
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
We will reach Indigenous youth through their pre-existing fascination in video games to inspire them to pursue STEM powered classes and careers!
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Great Falls, MT, USA
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?
In today's tech driven world, students from marginalized backgrounds (especially kids on Native American reservations) are often overlooked and fall through the cracks. This means they rarely get exposure to 21st Century tech and coding skills, which puts them at severe risk and disadvantage as the whole rest of the world becomes more and more tech savvy.
What is your solution?
Our solution, which we have been doing since 2011, is to reach kids where they're at through their pre-existing fascination in video games. Through demonstrations, hands-on exercises and more, we show them the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math), Careers and Community Impact behind game design, computer science and entrepreneurship with an aim to spark their interest in STEAM-powered classes and careers. This leads students to pursue those classes and careers to level up their personal lives and positively impact their communities! Sony did a video on our outreach you can see at https://youtu.be/SWzv7XMZiSE?si=P-EhwL02LawENIgq .
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We work with students across the US and Canada through online partners as well as Native school districts, state and Tribal Governments, community centers and more. Currently we reach several thousand kids a year, and would love to work with MIT to expand the outreach! Our goal is to demystify STEAM and computer science concepts so kids feel more confident in pursuing those classes and careers, and we already have had kids go from our program to college STEAM powered classes and then careers! We work with kids in a wide array of environments from cities all the way to 'fly in communities' (where you have to arrive by bi-plane) that we connect to over Zoom.
