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Due to the advances in automation and new technologies, half of the world’s workers will need to bring themselves current or be retrained by 2025 to adapt to the demands of the labor market. The skills required to fill company vacancies are not necessarily the same as what applicants can offer. Thus, more than 10 million young people are unsuccessfully looking for jobs.
The Open Innovation Initiative TPrize of the Institute for the Future of Education of Tecnologico de Monterrey and the University of the Andes, invited startups to offer solutions to educational challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This year, the call focused on resolving the following question:
How can young people acquire skills and create a personal and professional development plan to access better opportunities and actively participate in transforming their environments?
The call ended on October 6, 2022. The ten finalists of the TPrize 2022 challenge were determined from the analysis of 120 applications from 17 countries. Find out who they are!
The ten finalists of the TPrize 2022 challenge
- Einstein’s Desk | Juan Carlos Peñafiel Suarez (Spain)
- Wonderly | Leandro Finol (Venezuela)
- Ubicua | Juan Luis Lozada (Dominican Republic)
- Swarmob – Learning with Impact | Felipe Prado (Chile)
- 1Mentor | Esteban Veintimilla (Ecuador)
- KIMPLE | María Alejandra Herrera Jiménez (Argentina)
- ICT in Education with TAK-TAK-TAK | Regina Gonzalez Sánchez (Mexico)
- Medix Lab | Melissa Calderón (El Salvador)
- SKALO | Luisa Velez (Colombia)
- Robin Academy | Rogelio Valdes (Mexico)
Meet the finalist projects
Escritorio de Einstein
Escritorio de Einstein is a platform and marketplace of support services to improve the career choice of young people in Latin America. Vocational assessment allows the integration of a solution for young people and families. It includes psychometric assessment tools, a professional career guide, global university offerings, admission guidance, employment maps by country, an international online tutoring bank, internship and scholarship programs, a worldwide student benefits card, and access to innovative tools that improve the quality of professional decisions. The accompaniment facilitates the search to make the most appropriate decision while providing profiles and analysis of work styles.
Wonderly
Wonderly is an educational platform that certifies students ages eight to 18 in digital skills. Adopting pedagogical practices from Finland, instructors use animated videos to teach technological skills.
This high-quality, low-cost, large-scale project incorporates the benefits of gamification to generate a learning environment designed by technology experts. Currently, it offers a course for web designers to build dynamic sites with a 20-hour learning curve.
Ubicua
Ubicua is a virtual continuous-learning academy. Its purpose is to strengthen teachers’ digital skills in Latin America and the Caribbean. With the help of online, asynchronous, self-learning training programs, teachers learn about productivity tools and methodologies to bring to their classrooms.
In addition, the students of the teachers using the platform can develop workforce skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, creativity, and innovation. Likewise, students can obtain jobs based on their interests or develop the skills to become entrepreneurs.
Swarmob – Aprendizajes con Impacto
Swarmob is a web learning management platform that facilitates school adoption with a project-based learning methodology. Teachers and students instruct and learn by creating projects with social and environmental impact. Its name arises from combining the concepts of swarm intelligence and smart mob.
Its vision is to increase the capacities of children and young people for critical thinking and collaboration and to implement technology to find solutions to social problems. Swarmob seeks to promote the ability of the next generations to develop distributive, collective initiatives that lead to positive transformation.
1Mentor
1Mentor is an organization that works with educational institutions to improve their student programs related to career guidance, providing them with data-driven recommendations about the skills, tools, and knowledge required by the industry.
Preparing students for the future of work, they have analyzed more than 100 million job descriptions to determine precisely what skills employers are soliciting in their hiring. 1Mentor connects students to these required competencies through courses to meet their career goals. They aim to balance students’ competencies with job opportunities, empowering people with up-to-date information that helps them get the job they want.
Kimple
Kimple is a teaching platform with learning experiences grounded in social and work reality. Its objective is to enhance skills and knowledge in young people and thus reduce the gap in access to active learning methodologies. With current topics and challenges, they promote personal and social transformation, facilitating students’ insertion into the labor market. Thus, students can learn the skills necessary for work and their future, reinvent themselves throughout life, and “learn to learn.”
ICT in education with TAK-TAK-TAK
ICT in education with TAK-TAK-TAK provides playful educational tools that utilize Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to boost quality education and labor participation. This free system from Inoma makes technology fun and promotes education to leverage better job opportunities.The TAK-TAK-TAK System offers educational video games for children and a platform for parents and teachers to know digital tools for teaching, develop pedagogical strategies based on high-quality digital educational content, monitor students’ progress, and access scholarship information through a blog and webinars.
Medix Lab
Medix Lab is the first health metaverse in El Salvador for the development of technical and technological skills. 3D simulations developed with Symbiotic AI (artificial intelligence) allow safe health practice procedures while the user acquires and masters specialized skills and techniques.
This metaverse helps health professionals connect to diverse experiences and specialties and a network of contacts, leading to significant advances in the health sector with greater agility. The project began in 2020 as a prototype financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (BID in Spanish) through its BID Lab.
Skalo
Skalo is a digital platform for schools and teachers who, with technology and data, support students who have difficulties in the classroom, facilitating learning diversity and inclusion management. In Colombia, the education system lacks technological tools for teacher management of classrooms where students learn differently or confront permanent learning barriers.
Skalo facilitates and promotes diversity management in the classroom. The platform provides real-time data that helps teachers make curricular decisions. In addition, they can make a personalized adjustment plan and strategies that positively impact each student’s learning or career path.
Robin Academy is an online baccalaureate program to train professionals in technology. With a personalized pace for each student and inspiring mentors, the academy deploys a curriculum that includes extracurricular courses. The metaverse encompasses a complete panorama where attention is paid to group activities that focus on students’ social-emotional development and soft skills.
The grand finale of the TPrize 2022 challenge will take place on January 17, 2023, during the International Congress on Educational Innovation (CIIE 2023). For more information on the finalists and the TPrize 2022 challenge, visit: http://tprize.mx
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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