Education

the X PRIZE: creating incentives for learning

By drebabels (Andre Deutmeyer) ⋅ October 2, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

You cannot inspire others unless you yourself are inspired. So here is some inspiration for you.

The Long Now Foundation hosts a very interesting podcast called Seminars in Long Term Thinking (SALT). I was listening to their latest one, and the speaker for the show was Peter Diamandis - the founder of the X PRIZE Foundation. Although he was speaking about the advantages of using large prizes to create incentive to tackle problems in radical new ways, listening to this I think there is another message embedded in it.

For you multi-taskers, if you would like to listen to the podcast while you read, I have also embedded a copy at the bottom of this post. Enjoy.

History of the X PRIZE

On May 19, 1919 Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to London. At the time, no one believed that it could be done. But on May 27, 1927 that prize was won by Charles Lindbergh. Decades later, a young man by the name of Peter Diamandis heard this story and decided to create something radical… a vision that would send him into space.

In 1996, the first X PRIZE was formally announced. Backed by the Ansari family, the X PRIZE was…

“A prize with a goal that sat at the intersection of audacious and achievable…26 teams from 7 countries spent 100 million dollars [in total]” for a 10 million dollar prize. With the success of SpaceShipOne, we changed the paradigm that spaceflight was just for governments…and we changed government regulation in the process.“

Since the maiden flight of SpaceShipOne on October 4, 2004, there has been more than $1.5 billion dollars in public and private expenditure in support of the private spaceflight industry. This story is Peter Diamandis’ vision.

The X PRIZE Today

Now backed by Google co-founders Larry Paige, Sergey Brin and others, the scope of the X PRIZE has expanded dramatically and in some senses become even more ambitious than that original goal “to reach an altitude of 100km, and to do it again within two weeks”. Today the X PRIZE Foundation offers or will be offering prizes in 5 distinct verticals:

• Energy and Environment
• Global Development - wealth creation to combat poverty
• Exploration - space and underwater
• Education
• The Life Sciences

Listening to this, I can’t help but want to turn back the clock and start my schooling all over again. I want to take the right courses and learn the things that I need to so that I can help tackle one of these problems. And I cannot alone in this feeling. Since the Ansari X PRIZE was won, the X PRIZE Foundation have seen an extraordinary amount of interest - interest on the magnitude of “five and a half billion media impressions”. Alas since I cannot go back in time and choose a new course, I will do what I can to promote this and encourage our children to tackle these problems.

Making Incentive Prizes Work

So how does it work?

“When there is a market failure… when things are stuck… when there are entrenched bureaucracies… and when there is a stigma surrounding it - people are saying that ‘this’ cannot be done, that is when these incentive prizes like the X PRIZE work best.“

Do we face this problem in the way we educate our children today? I would say so, and there are many out there who would agree with me. So what can be done?

Making It Work For Education

As I see it the X PRIZE can be leveraged in two different ways to benefit education.

On the one side it can inspire educators and non-educators alike to invent and evolve in order to change the way we educate. The X PRIZE Foundation envisions prizes in two areas:

• Learning technologies: software and platform trials for products/services that dramatically accelerate learning and expand access.
• City competitions: mobilizing new resources and methods to improve early learning or college/work readiness.

Now I don’t know how many of you have read Ender’s Game but part of the training that the protagonist Ender Wiggens undergoes takes place through a computer game based on adaptive digital content. The game continuously assesses Ender’s skill, his interests, and his reactions to customize delivery. So why am I telling you this?

Ender’s Game was written in 1985 - the nascent stages of the personal computer industry. Orson Scott Card, the author, imagined an educational computer game like the one envisioned by the X PRIZE a decade before the X PRIZE was born. We live in a time now where his fictional visions can become a reality. We live in a time where sci-fiction can become… and does become reality. As educators we need to realize this, and we need to hold on to that vision because unless we do, we will not change the way our kids learn.

Additionally, the X PRIZE can inspire our students, just as it inspires us. Some of the competitions being presented by the X PRIZE Foundation may take decades to come to fruition. And they can serve as long term objectives for the children growing up today.

Who knows… maybe one of your students will win a billion dollars and save our planet in the process. It is our job to make sure they realize that this dream is possible.

Listen to the full podcast below. Click here to return to the top.

Download X PRIZE Founder Peter Diamandis Speaks About Highly Leveraged Incentive Driven Competitions

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Tags: Long Now Foundation, Peter Diamandis, X-Prize