Google's ambitious world changing project winners

Here are the results of Google's ambitious world changing project, I blogged about in 2009

It was neat to see the Khan Academy as one of the "world changing" winners. It will be neat to see where these projects go!

Project 10¹⁰⁰ Winners

We are pleased to announce the winners of Google’s Project 10¹⁰⁰.

Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted over 150,000 ideas. From that group, we narrowed it to the final 16 ideasfor public vote.

The following five ideas received the most votes and are the winners of Project 10¹⁰⁰. Over the past 12 months, we have reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas. We are pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free

Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education

Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Idea: Make government more transparent

Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport

Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.

Idea: Provide quality education to African students

Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

One Idea on How to Fix Our Broken K-12 Educational System

I found the following idea from http://www.ideasforourfuture.com/ pretty interesting and wondered what others think (It is listed under TOPIC 4). I recommend reading and discussing the pros and cons of the other ideas on the site as well with your peers, colleagues, and classmates. These would be great problems to tackle in our schools.

This problem deals with the question "How can we Fix Our Broken K-12 Educational System?" PROPOSED ANSWER: Recruit Our Top Teachers and Produce EXCITING World-Class Lessons on Video and use them in both the online and face to face classrooms of the world.

Big Ideas:

• The idea starts as an ingenious new reality TV show, selecting the absolute best K-12 teachers (for every grade and every subject) in the USA.
• the winning teachers (one for every grade & every subject) will be professionally video recorded in their actual home classrooms for one entire school year
• The half-hour videos, one for each class period, will give the home classroom teacher equal time per hour to introduce, pause the show, elicit classroom comment and answer questions. The videos won’t be a "threat" to the home teachers; rather, CS will relieve them of having to insure required material is presented, as well as relieving them of having to prepare their daily lessons.
• In-class teachers will be inspired by the excellent teaching examples and by the possibility of someday becoming celebrity teachers themselves.
• CS videos will be universally available (i would add online) for take-home use (repetitive viewing is crucial) and for family entertainment.
• CS will bring top quality education to the poorest urban ghetto schools and the tiniest country schools all over the country. They will be made available to prison inmates to view (and finally get a quality education) rather than watching ordinary TV or video games. The videos are a natural for the internet and will also be shown on dedicated CS TV channels as "edu-tainment", similar to Nova, Cosmos, Discovery & the History Channel (but much more exciting to watch).

What do you think about this idea? Pros and Cons? Why haven't we leveraged our best teachers in the world in such a systemic and organized way?