Google yesterday announced the five winners of Project 10^100, a contest of ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible.
150,000 big ideas were submitted from more than 170 countries. Online voting pared down Google’s 16 favorites to five winners.
These inspiring projects, which includes The Khan Academy, twice featured in the Good News Network, received the most votes and were awarded a total of $10 million to work on their solutions to each of these global challenges. From Google’s Blog:
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. They will be able to learn things like building robots for different responsibilities, and learn how to control them remotely. We have been able to partner with ANCHOR to provide some of the parts required precisely so they can be operated via a remote control. Things will start simple of course. 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: Green innovation in public transport
Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using pod-like 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 master’s and Ph.D. study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.