As emerging technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, etc.) reshape the workforce, employers increasingly prioritize durable skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and self-direction. Yet many learning experiences remain focused on content acquisition, without sufficient attention to developing these competencies or empowering student agency, leaving a growing disconnect between what students learn in school and the skills needed for future careers. To improve student outcomes in college, career, and life, students must be equipped with executive functioning capacities and durable, future-ready skills that will prepare them for success.

The ATS Hub is hosting a virtual, crowdsourced ideas challenge open to the public to address this critical need. The guiding question of the challenge is: What breakthrough, highly scalable ideas (model, policy, system, or tool) could foster every learner's agency, durable skills and/or executive functioning skills while building academic content knowledge?

The goal is to identify novel ideas grounded in or informed by evidence that have the potential to be transformed into scalable solutions. Ideas must be supported by peer-reviewed scientific research, practice-based insights, or documented patterns from the field. 

Through three competitive phases, participants will engage in learning opportunities with industry leaders, receive mentoring and support for further development of their ideas, and complete activities in preparation for developing applications to submit to formal funding opportunities to implement and test their ideas. Participants that advance to the Prize Phase of the challenge will also receive $10,000 to support their idea, and three winners will each receive a prize of $50,000.

This work is funded by:

This material was developed under IES Award R305N250006 from the U.S. Department of Education. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of IES.