The Futures Forum on Learning has announced the winners of its Tools Competition, an initiative focused on accelerating pandemic-related learning recovery for K-12 students and advancing the field of learning engineering.

Sponsored by Schmidt Futures and Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, the competition generated nearly nine hundred proposals from fifty-five countries, with eighteen winning teams eligible to receive more than $1.5 million to fund tools, technologies, platforms, and research that addresses a range of learning issues and goals. In addition to the cash prize, the first installment of which has already been delivered, the winning teams will be provided with opportunities to connect with leaders in the field and present their ideas to a panel of educators for further refinement, review, and funding.

Winning projects include the Springboard Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on closing the literacy gap by harnessing teaching potential within families; UPchieve, a real-time tutoring platform for low-income students; Rising Academies School Network, which is developing an interactive chatbot tutor to complement high-quality radio instruction; and Kolibri, an adaptable, open-source platform that supports offline-first teaching and learning.

"The Tools Competition is built on three big ideas," said Kumar Garg, managing director and head of partnerships at Schmidt Futures. "We must address the global learning loss from the pandemic now or risk the consequences lasting for years. We must develop new solutions. And we can’t just chase after silver bullets — we have to actually invest in tools that use the best learning science and have the infrastructure for continuous improvement. That’s the value of learning engineering, and that’s what all of these winners exemplify."

For a complete list of the winning proposals, see the Schmidt Futures website.