MIT Challenges 2024-2025

We are pleased to announce our MIT Challenges for the 2024-2025 School year!

Challenge 1: Design Solutions with AI

16th September – 8th November

The Expert 

Prof. Faez Ahmed, ABS Career Development Assistant Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering

The Challenge

Al has the potential to speed up the product design process and help each of us unlock our inner designer. Just like we learn by doing, machine learning looks at past data and predicts the future.

With Al, Professor Ahmed imagines a world where anyone with a great idea can put it into practice and make a real-world impact, regardless of discipline-specific degrees and training.

Professor Ahmed challenges you to channel your inner product designer and consider how you could use Al to improve an existing, product that you use in your daily life.

Challenge 2: Design Solutions for Climate

2nd December – 14th February

The Expert

Prof. Ariel Furst, MIT Chemical Engineering. A cross-disciplinary thinker and expert in biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering, working to understand how industrial byproducts impact the climate and looking for climate solutions in unexpected places!

The Challenge

Our day-to-day actions have consequences we can't always see. Our cars and planes produce exhaust, our lunches come in plastic that ends up in landfills and waterways. These small, daily actions add up to a big impact on our climate!

Professor Furst challenges your students to think across disciplines and look for creative solutions to turn a product or byproduct of climate change into something useful. Design a creative solution to this big problem!

Challenge 3: Design Solutions for Good

3rd March – 25th April 25

The Expert

MIT’s Code for Good is a club created and led entirely by MIT Students! They use their tech skills to help local non profits improve their websites, data tracking, or whatever problem they may be facing that needs a tech solution. This allows the local nonprofits to make a big impact for good, with help from MIT!

The Challenge

In this challenge, students will think about creative ways to remove, reuse, or repurpose these byproducts. All students can learn about the history of the industrial revolution, and how this created new chemical compounds and different pollutants. Maybe biology could help us find a microbe that eats trash. Or chemistry might show us away to turn car exhaust into fuel! Beginning students may learn about industrial byproducts and identify byproducts in their daily lives. Or they might think about how academic disciplines-all the subjects they study in school-overlap and how we can combine those disciplines to better understand a problem. Older students might develop an idea for repurposing an industrial byproduct, and sketch out a plan from designing to prototyping to testing

Our students and teacher also had the opportunity to go to MIT in person to experience learning. 

Click to read BSB students at the MIT-Nord Anglia STEAM Trip and BSB Teacher at MIT Professional Development Week.