Hussein Khalil of the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil will provide young people in urban slums with knowledge and tools to identify elements that promote the spread of diseases by rats and mosquitos such as dengue and Zika virus infection, and engage their communities to help combat those diseases. They will recruit 40 young residents from two urban slums to test their approach. The youth will be taught to map rat- and mosquito-infested areas and identify possible causes, such as poor waste disposal, by photographing their environments, and to use tools to track rat movements and insect breeding. They will also use gamification methods to stimulate learning and promote collaborations between the youth and adult residents to identify the most effective interventions. Once simple solutions have been identified, the youth will help to implement them in their community and produce and share progress reports using online and offline tools.

Rimjhim Aggarwal of Arizona State University in the U.S. will use a digital learning platform and teaching network to teach young people how to create 360-degree spherical imagery of field sites that function as virtual field trips to share their experiences about specific UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and better engage and teach others. These virtual field trips can be distributed on the internet, giving a large number of viewers the sense of actually being in the field, and are thus valuable teaching tools. However, they require specialized skills and equipment to create them. They will teach young people how to make them by holding a workshop to train 20 honors and undergraduate university students to create three new virtual field trips for local SDGs. These will then be presented to other students as part of a university course via a digital learning platform to evaluate their impact.

Alpha Sennon of WHYFARM in Trinidad and Tobago, along with Wainella Isaacs, Candace Charles-Sennon, Luke Smith, George Caesar, Akinola Sennon and their partners at TECH4Agri, will engage young people, who are the future feeders of 2050, in agriculture, and develop their knowledge and skills so that they can promote sustainable agriculture and improve food security in Trinidad and Tobago. They will implement four related projects in which participants can win cash prizes. These projects include an eight-week training course for ten professionals aged 18 to 30 that provides mentorship and skills to help develop their business plans, tours of ten primary schools with a local youth theater production company to teach nine to eleven year olds about the nutritional and economic value of baigan (eggplant), including a competition to design their own superheroes and nutritious snacks, and focusing their Agricultural Fun, Museum and Food Factory Park for the under 30's to teach visitors about food and local agricultural products using educational games. They will evaluate each project using surveys and metrics such as numbers of participants and related activity on social media.

Henry May of Coschool in Colombia will develop an integrated teaching course including in-person boot camps, mobile learning, and online communities, to equip teachers with advanced skills and tools to promote the wellbeing of themselves and their schools and communities. Teaching 21^st century skills can help bridge the wide achievement gap between urban and rural communities in Colombia, and also help peace building in post-conflict territory. Their method focuses on five skills: growth mindset, self-awareness, empathy, critical thinking, and grit. To promote teaching of these skills, they have designed an integrated course that involves a six-hour boot camp for effective face-to-face teaching of large numbers of teachers; a twenty-hour course on a mobile, gamified platform; and monthly webinars for small groups with workshops and interactive learning. They will create the new course content and evaluate it by running the program over nine months with 1,000 teachers in five regions in Colombia.

Malcolm Mooi of the Dr CL Smith Foundation in South Africa will further develop their common online platform for teachers, which provides training, materials, and support to improve the quality of teaching in South Africa. Teachers are the number one drivers of learning in schools, but there is a lack of curriculum and holistic support for teachers in many countries, which has a direct, negative impact on student performance. They will use a variety of mathematical and technological approaches to refine their preliminary platform by adding new features to improve user experience and work to grow an online community of educators and organizers to attract more users. The performance of the platform will be measured by analyzing growth and user engagement. By exploring opportunities to connect the platform and associated data with education councils and corporations and unlock added value for teachers such as rewards and discounts, they aim to elevate the status of teachers in society and further improve teaching quality.

Yen Verhoeven of the Paragon Learning Research Group in the U.S. will create a digital platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and a supportive online community of professionals for kindergarten to sixth grade teachers to transform their teaching practices and bring STEM and 21^st century skills to their schools. MOOCs were developed as a means to provide free education to everyone. However, their content is typically restricted to videos and reading with little interactive learning, which is inadequate for teaching life skills such as critical thinking and creativity. And encouraging teachers to adopt new teaching practices requires additional professional support from peers and mentors. To address these issues, they will work with teachers and teaching experts to formulate a new MOOC design containing a variety of instructional resources and free professional development classes and develop a beta version of the online community platform. They will evaluate the course by teaching it to local K-6 teachers and gathering feedback to refine the content.

Hans Brunner of Value Spring Technology, Inc. in the U.S. will build and test an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor to teach the scientific method and critical thinking skills to individual students at their pace and level. All children learn differently but one-on-one lessons are often prohibitively expensive or unavailable. To address this, in collaboration with two non-profit teaching institutions, they will adapt their AI software for education, and build and train an AI tutor, Ali. Ali will be designed to produce natural sounding language to engage students in conversation involving open-ended questions and answers that stimulate critical thinking, which is based on the Socratic method. Students will be taught at their own pace and level of understanding, and Ali will be built to ensure each topic is fully understood before starting the next. They will engage teachers to test and critique their AI tutor approach and to evaluate its teaching performance.

Hou Kroeun of the Cambodia office of Helen Keller International will evaluate the additional impact of promoting gender equality on households’ food security and health. They will recruit households spanning 180 rural communities in Kampong Cham Province to evaluate the impact of a gender-transformative Enhanced Homestead Food Production intervention, which will provide agricultural training and resources through primary contact with the female head of household, as well as sessions addressing gender issues with all main-decision makers in the family. They will then test the impact of this women-centered approach on household food security and nutritional status.

Saiqa Mullick of Wits Reproductive Health & HIV Research Institute (RHI) in South Africa, along with Grass Root Soccer (GRS), Sonke Gender Justice, and the Population Council, will empower adolescent girls in South African townships as they progress in education by increasing their educational, health, social, and economic assets, while at the same time shifting gender attitudes and encouraging positive behavior among adolescent boys. The “Girls Achieve Power” (GAP) Year Program will work with schools and communities to encourage a culture of health and safety, and promote school retention among adolescent girls. Using soccer as a program platform, and enlisting local coaches as facilitators, the program will enable a healthy and productive progression for adolescent girls through secondary school. Aside from these direct benefits, the program will also expand the evidence base around the impact of asset-building approaches for adolescent girls.

Rakesh Jain of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. will develop a new treatment strategy for tuberculosis to boost the activity of existing anti-tuberculosis drugs. Tuberculosis is one of the most infectious diseases in the world. Current treatments are lengthy poorly tolerated and do not eradicate latent infections which are found in around one third of the general population and contribute to drug resistance. During latent infection the tuberculosis bacteria are dormant and reside in small inflammatory areas in the lungs known as granulomas. These granulomas are surrounded by abnormal blood vessels and dense tissue that they hypothesize make it difficult for drugs to permeate. They will use a small animal disease model and patient lung samples to test whether co-treatment with anti-angiogenics and anti-fibrotics can normalize the blood vessels and improve the delivery of anti-tuberculosis drugs thereby increasing their activity and potentially shortening treatment duration.

Lauren Hendricks and team at CARE in Uganda will analyze whether motivating women to use mobile financial technology increases their involvement in making household financial decisions, and subsequently improves family health and education. They will develop mobile money subwallets for specific purposes such as school fees and pregnancy so that women can more securely manage their savings. They will also work with influential members of a subset of households to help promote gender equality and develop a consensus towards a household financial action plan.