The Epic Education Foundation has decided to add a new challenge to its 2019 – 2020 portfolio due to the current Covid-19 pandemic, the fact that schools around the world have been closed prematurely, and educators at all levels (K-16) are struggling to adapt to delivering engaging, relevant content online using a myriad of educational technology.
The new epic challenge entitled, Pandemic-Proof Society, will begin next week. We are developing curricula at the high school and university levels in real time and will be enlisting a team of volunteer educators, subject-matter-experts (SMEs), and mentors to join the Epic Challenge Team to help us co-create engaging content/lessons, join an online network of Communities of Practice (CoPs) which will include focused content and enable informed discussions with SMEs, peers, educators and mentors; and work in teams to conceive, mature, develop and prototype solutions in various categories regarding the mitigation, cure, sustained containment, and prevention of future pandemics.
The world has experienced 20 pandemics with 9 occurring in recent times beginning with the Spanish Flu in 1918 (H1N1virus). While the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world with an ever increasing infection and death rates, medical doctors, scientists, engineers, economists, mathematicians, and data analysts are racing to understand this new virus and now to save lives, communities, businesses and societies. We need to develop predictive and protective measures to ensure this is the last pandemic our society will face. Epic Challenge Pandemic-Proof Society, while focusing on the current Covid-19 pandemic will explore innovative ways to ensure this pandemic will be our last!
The Epic Challenge follows an innovative conceptual engineering design (ICED) methodology developed by Dr. Camarda while working as an Astronaut on understanding the cause of the Columbia tragedy and developing technology to ensure a safe return to flight. The ICED methodology is ideally suited to inspire, motivate, and sustain student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math by aligning their individual for exploration, creativity, and problem solving to student centric challenges of epic proportions. It utilizes experiential, problem-based and phenomenon-based learning (PBL and PhBL) pedagogies to accelerate learning using a hands-on, explore-analyze-design-build-test-fail-discover-learn experience in a psychologically-safe environment.
