We aren’t teaching our young people the skills they need today, and with some 40% of current worker skills predicted to be outdated by 2030, we aren’t teaching them the skills they’ll need in the future. Three innovations in STEM education from the 2026 HundrED Global Collection are leading the way: Eedi’s precision diagnostics, Green Shoots’ systematic approach to equity, and Starfish Maker’s process-driven design each provide examples of deeply contextualised strategies that can help move the needle on the learning crisis. By looking to their leadership, we can find a path towards improvements in STEAM education built on smart diagnostics, resilience, and adaptive scaling across diverse contexts.
The Global Collection represents impactful and scalable ideas in education from around the world. The three innovative solutions in this article are based in the UK, South Africa, and Thailand.
Diagnosing the "Why" - Precision and Systemic Support in Mathematics
Like many other subjects, maths education is built upon its own foundations. That means that an early misconception can have a tremendous effect on later learning, as it ramifies and becomes something different entirely. Eedi, based in the UK, combines this knowledge with one key insight: the education sector is rich in data but poor in insights, with most assessments coming too big, too late, and too bluntly to make an impact, says Dr. Bibi Groot, Eedi’s Chief Impact Officer. Measurement that doesn’t move the needle on outcomes isn’t useful to anyone, which informs Eedi’s structure, which uses frequent small assessments to diagnose maths misconceptions.
With Eedi, the goal is to move beyond simply knowing if students understand basic concepts to why they answered the way they did. With each response - correct or incorrect to more than 60,000 diagnostic questions - Eedi builds a map of the student’s representations of mathematics. With this knowledge mapped out, Eedi makes recommendations about how to help that student address their misconceptions. It’s this laser focus on misconceptions in addition to conceptions and mastery that set their work apart. Their recent RCT study found that, over the course of a single academic year, using Eedi helps students achieve two additional months of progress - and double that for engaged students who spent just 15 minutes practicing per week.
Eedi's platform uses mistakes to develop maps of misconceptions and masteries for each student, allowing them to provide laser-focused targeted support.
Importantly, focusing on how students misunderstand doesn’t only have implications for student success. It also, paradoxically, affects their intrinsic motivation. When the concepts that underpin maths are clear, frustrations are much less likely to knock students off their game. To develop this intrinsic motivation further, students are encouraged to self mark their answers, exploring their thinking and correcting their errors. They are also exploring the use of LLMs alongside human tutors, which is grounded in individual students’ comprehension of the maths space, to build targeted reflections and opportunities for practice.
Jo Besford and Mark Swartz, the cofounders of South Africa’s Green Shoots Integrated Maths Programme (IMP), agree that confidence in maths is key to student success. “Our core belief is that where you’re born cannot disqualify you from quality education and maths is the enabler,” says Jo. “We work with people, not computers.”
By strongly integrating the national curricula, the Integrated Maths Programme allows teachers to keep track of what students know and need to practice more, even in large classrooms.
To that end, Green Shoots focuses on what they call the “warmware” of the classroom: the teachers that develop long-term relationships with students. South African classrooms are often large - between 45 and 60 students - and providing timely feedback is a major challenge. The IMP digitises the curriculum, providing immediate and effective formative assessment through its Brain Quests. Green Shoots’ success has led to its integration into the provincial ministry of education’s primary school maths strategy, providing school leaders at every level access to real-time customizable data dashboards that highlight the insights that teachers most need, even in contexts with minimal data infrastructure.
The impact is clear in the numbers (schools that regularly used IMP had a more than 9% increase in passing on provincial maths assessments), but more importantly in the sense of pride tangible throughout the school. “We have one school principal that used to hide in district meetings because the school’s maths scores were so low. Now, he sits in the front row and is excited to share what he has learned,” shares Jo. He’s not the only evangelist, and their impact studies find the biggest advantages for the lowest-performing schools: Green Shoots’ tools support their goal of making maths education equitable.
Beyond Mastery - Cultivating Process, Creativity, and Resilience
While Green Shoots and Eedi focus on knowledge and misconceptions, their application to STEAM skills is just as important. 21st century skills like critical thinking and innovation can be developed with the proper supports, such as the STEAM design cycle around which the Starfish Maker is built. The process includes five steps. Students ask, imagine, plan, create, and finally reflect and revisit the process again from the top. This streamlined take on design thinking is tangible, teachable, and broadly adaptable to a huge variety of contexts, experiments, tools, and educational systems.
Dr. Prae Seributra, CEO of Starfish Education in Thailand, finds that this structured creativity makes it much easier for students to ask questions - tricky in traditional Thai schools where questioning is not the norm. The built in reflection also develops SEL skills, building resilience and challenging the traditional “test once, fail once” models that are still prevalent in many regions today.
The Starfish Maker is adaptable to students of a wide variety of ages, allowing children much younger than most would expect to start thinking like a scientist.
Part of the challenge is that many of the schools that might benefit from maker education lack the resources to build workshops or invest in computers for coding practice. Prae says that the Starfish Maker and STEAM design process come together as a mental space more than a physical one. That means that it’s equally at home in a full fledged lab, a corner of a classroom, or simply a box on a cart. Its projects are designed to take advantage of locally available materials to solve real problems in their environments. Teachers who adopt the programme often find their students repurposing scrap into tools - water pumps, boats or turntables.
Adapting Strategies for Systemic Scale
Each of these innovative solutions show the importance of adapting their offerings while staying true to their core. Starfish has found strong success in scaling through an ecosystem approach. The internationally recognised Starfish School serves as a model and test ground for new pedagogical practices, Starfish Academy provides training for educators, and the online learning platform Starfish Labz provides community support for teachers to share what has worked for them - all part of Dr. Prae’s vision of scaling the impact of the initial, tiny school.
Green Shoots has designed the IMP to be device agnostic from the beginning - helping make it more affordable and easier to integrate into systems. The interface is streamlined, which minimises data usage and allows access from older devices and allows multiple students to learn from a single device. These help them keep their administrative costs low - less than USD $4 per student per year, while providing rich insights to teachers and administrators.
Eedi shows the importance of partnership with EdTech providers and publishers - by embedding their technology into existing platforms, they aim to impact 1 billion learners. Of course, their high-tech high-touch approach must adapt to reach that goal. They are hard at work at developing universal designs that can overcome structural barriers - in their home UK, many students lack devices for individual use of the programme. Eedi has been developing a formative assessment tool that uses individual QR codes that allow students to answer questions and for teachers to get whole-class analytics instantly - and this innovation will help them offer their tools to classrooms in infrastructure-poor contexts.
These three organizations demonstrate that innovation in education is not singular but relies on a blend of deeply analyzed diagnostic feedback, resilience-focused, process-based learning, and highly adaptive scaling models that empower local systems. The success of these programs is measured not only by test scores but by the cultural shift they create, where "the kids want to come to school because they want to go to make a space,” and where math fosters a sense of pride and community engagement. What comes next is up to these students themselves.
Learn more about the 2026 HundrED Global Collection and follow up on the 100 Days of HundrED campaign.
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