In 2015, we saw a gap in the innovation ecosystem - resources were available to help people create innovations and start businesses, but these resources were unaccessible to students in high schools. Resources were located far away from many students, closed outside of school hours, or required business plans to engage. Our program overcomes these gaps by bringing this training into schools.
Our PBL program is customized for the needs of individual classrooms and teachers, and we work with teachers to ensure each program meets curriculum and learning expectations.
The typical process is that we are engaged by a teacher, who shares their needs (e.g., 1-day design thinking workshop, 1-period workshop to kick off the grade 10 Science project assignment, a term-long PBL course). Based on this, we design a customized program derived from our core program.
For instruction in classrooms, either a Y2 instructor facilitates the program or we train the teacher to do so, and provide supports such as teacher guides and videos. For all of our programs, students use a Google Slide workbook or printed-out worksheets.
We developed the program entirely on our own, and to date we have worked with more than 8000 students in 60+ schools and in 14 school boards in Ontario. Feedback from students, teachers, admin, school board staff and parents all indicate our program is engaging.
We have had the opportunity to work with more than 8000 students in more than 60 schools and 14 school boards in Ontario. We have worked with students in all types of disciplines - academic, applied and skilled trades.
We aspire to work with the boards and schools who we have existing relationships with, and expand our programs to engage underserved populations (e.g., skilled trades) while continuing to serve the student populations who we have often worked with (e.g., health & wellness, arts & culture, business, ICT, sciences, geography, etc).
To find out more about our PBL program (in-person or online), contact Lucas Chang at lucas@y2labs.co.
For a taste of our online program (which we also customized), people can try (for free) this program that we introduced early on in COVID: https://lucas-school-82cf.thinkific.com/.
