XPRIZE AND U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION’S INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION SCIENCES ANNOUNCE REGISTERED TEAMS IN $1M DIGITAL LEARNING CHALLENGE TO MODERNIZE EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES

Dec 14 2021

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33 registered teams’ technical submissions are currently under review before moving forward to the pilot study where they will demonstrate their systems capabilities

LOS ANGELES (Dec. 14, 2021) -- XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, today announced the 33 registered teams from 19 different states registered for the Digital Learning Challenge. The long-term goal of the challenge is to modernize, accelerate, and improve the processes for studying effective learning and education. 

This is the first XPRIZE competition sponsored by a federal government agency, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the independent and nonpartisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education.  

The Digital Learning Challenge incentivizes the use of AI methods, big data, and machine learning to better understand practices that support educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the tens of millions of Americans enrolled in formal education every year. The experiments conducted for the challenge will build understanding of educational processes that are working well and ones that need to be improved to achieve better outcomes.

A judging panel of experts is now reviewing the registered teams’ technical submissions and will determine which teams will move on to the pilot study phase of the challenge. Competitors include individuals, for-profit companies, educational institutions, 501(c)(3) private foundations and public charities from across the United States.

“We’re encouraged to see so many teams coming from different backgrounds and sectors to work toward improving something as essential to society as how people learn,” said Dr. Mark Schneider, the director of IES. “By harnessing the ingenuity of these technological innovations we can be several steps closer to closing the achievement gap and improving the educational methods of yesterday.” 

“In an unprecedented time of Zoom calls, hybrid schooling and an abundance of available data, it’s imperative that we develop better, faster and more effective ways to analyze data that improve the U.S. education system,” stated XPRIZE Digital Learning Challenge Technical Lead Dr. Monique Golden. “After fifteen years in higher education and career training, it is exciting to help identify the next era of innovators that will improve learning outcomes for students of all backgrounds across this country.”

The registered Digital Learning Challenge teams are: 

  • Agavi (Arizona)
  • ASSISTments X (Alabama)
  • Binom (California)
  • BitBadges (Virginia)
  • CEHD XTeam (Minnesota)
  • District Zero (Illinois)
  • EduaAI (Connecticut)
  • Education Analytics (Wisconsin)
  • Evidentally (California)
  • Graspable Math (Indiana)
  • Heroes League (Ohio)
  • High school kid (California)
  • HINTS-IAI-team (North Carolina)
  • Human Program (Texas)
  • Innovation Learning Lab (Georgia)
  • INVBATAI (Arizona)
  • KAIT from Knowledge AI (Massachusetts)
  • Kolibri (California)
  • Lift2Ascend (Ohio)
  • Literacy Accelerator to Scale Ed Research (LASER) (California)
  • ML for at home learning (Florida)
  • Museums of the Future (Delaware)
  • The Neural Network (Massachusetts)
  • PH87 (Iowa)
  • Physio X (California)
  • RobotGuru (Delaware)
  • ROYBI Robot (California)
  • Sim (California)
  • STEMuli (Texas)
  • Terracotta (Indiana)
  • UpGrade (Pennsylvania)
  • Veritas (Georgia)
  • The Way (New York)

To review the education and technology experts serving as competition judges, please visit xprize.org/challenge/digitallearning/articles/meet-the-judges-of-xprize-digital-learning-challenge.

For the pilot study, teams will have six months to demonstrate the capabilities of their systems in an accredited education institutional setting and then 30 days to launch a replication study with at least one unique learner demographic. Top teams will build systems to conduct rapid, reproducible experiments and demonstrate the educational infrastructure in a formal learning context. The final experiments must be replicated at least five times within 30 days with three or more distinct demographics. The winner of the competition will receive the grand prize of up to $1,000,000.

For more information on the Digital Learning Challenge and the teams involved, please visit xprize.org/challenge/digitallearning.  


 About XPRIZE

XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement of over 1 million people and rising, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling and $1 Million Digital Learning Challenge. Donate, sign up, or join a team at xprize.org. 

 About IES

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the independent and nonpartisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the public.

IES supports work that addresses school readiness and education from infancy through adulthood and includes special populations such as English Learners and students with disabilities.