Students

Designing

Solutions

Helping students and teachers find academic joy and purpose through engaged problem-solving.

Welcome to the Design Challenge Network

We are a New England-based nonprofit founded by teachers for teachers. We help students and teachers find joy, purpose, and deeper learning through the use of engaged problem-solving and by linking real-world issues with the skills and content students need.

We know too many students feel disengaged in school and seek more relevancy and agency in their learning, and we know that too many committed and excellent teachers want more inspiring, inclusive, and real-world classrooms.

Our challenges can play a critical role in reaching these goals. Think of them as high-level Project Based-Learning (PBL): collaborative, competitive experiences in which student teams identify an existing problem, create a solution, and defend their work in front of a panel of judges.

Students who have participated in our challenges have unleashed their creativity, developed 21st-century skills, and learned academic content linked to standards and competencies. Design challenges have breathed new life into classrooms and teachers and have resulted in student internships, powerful essays, and new passions.

STUDENT TESTIMONIALS

  • “It’s incredible how much passion each one of us has for the issues we are trying to solve. It certainly gives me hope for the future of our community.”

  • “I enjoyed this project as it was so different from any project that I had done before. I loved how open-ended it was. You could do any idea that you were interested in and we had enough time to fully research it. I think it should be done again next year.”

  • “I would definitely rate it as one of the most enjoyable and useful learning experiences I’ve had in high school. Definitely do it again.”

  • “This is different from anything I have done and has really helped me decide what I want to do in college since this is something I’ve always been interested in, but never got the chance to try.”

  • “I felt the innovation aspect really forced us to be creative and innovative in ways traditional learning does not, and the process of working with a group helped foster collaboration and communication.”

  • “We learned how to use design-thinking, create a prototype, and to extend our idea to a business model.”

TEACHER TESTIMONIALS

  • “The genius of a public project is that it gives students the opportunity to have real-world knowledge that can be infinitely more useful. These kinds of projects are excellent at creating student buy-in and community engagement. They really raise the level of work.”

  • “In the past, I have not seen this level of iteration and commitment to [their work]. I saw a different level of caring.”

  • “I no longer tell students the answer. I now ask more questions and work to have students ask more questions. I am helping students find and develop their best next steps.”

  • “Students were very focused on the public nature. As quality developed and they became more confident, the competitive side really came out. They kept asking, how can we make this better?”

  • “I love that you can’t open a textbook and find the answer.”

  • “I have worked for a lot of nonprofits and international organizations, and if we can teach students to ask our users what they need, we will be better designers of things that matter in the world.”

Two ways for Teachers and Students to engage:

We work with the University of New Hampshire to offer the Community Changemaker Challenge, a program open and adaptable to any high school classroom in New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, southern Maine, and eastern Vermont. This competition has been running for six years and involves students identifying a local, national, or global problem; creating an innovative solution; submitting a paper and video; and participating in a defense of their work in front of a panel of judges at UNH. There is no cost to the school or the students to enter and projects can be completed anywhere from 3-6 weeks. We offer teachers a curriculum, training, and coaching to ensure their existing classroom goals are enhanced by the experience.

We also work with schools and teachers to create school-based design challenges that take place within a few different classes, across a grade level, or within the whole school. We know every school is different so we work with you to co-design the program, including lesson plans, student expectations, and the judging rubric. These school-based design challenges allow many students to be involved in this type of learning and provide a unique opportunity for a school to showcase student work to their community. If you are interested in learning more about this offering, please email our President, Brent Powell (brent@designchallengenetwork.org).