Announcing the Student-Led Ideation Challenge (SLIC) 2016 Program

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is pleased to announce the Student-Led Ideation Challenge (SLIC) Program. The SLIC Program is a competitive ideation challenge utilizing Design Thinking principles that is open to all high school students in Virginia and is being offered in collaboration with the VDOE and the Innovative Solutions Consortium at no cost to students, schools, or school divisions. The purpose of the SLIC Program is to further prepare Virginia’s students for the world ahead via their participation in project-based learning opportunities that will support the development of critical skills while enhancing general student knowledge through meaningful engagement in a variety of real-world topic areas.

The Innovative Solutions Consortium (ISC), a Virginia non-profit and national leader in public challenges, successfully implemented the Loudoun County Public Schools Challenge in 2015. Using the Loudon Challenge as a model, the VDOE in collaboration with the ISC looks forward to piloting the SLIC program this year and will seek input and feedback from students, teachers, and other state and local leaders on further refining the program for future challenges.

The SLIC program presents students with selecting a challenge question and working in a team to brainstorm ideas to solve the challenge. Students will develop a proposed solution to the challenge question, verify and validate the solution through research on similar solutions in the marketplace, and develop and implement a plan with estimated costs and measurement tools.  The winners will have the opportunity to build their prototype of the solution and present it to key stakeholders culminating in school, division, regional, and state-level competitions. Additionally, schools/teachers that support the winning teams from each region will receive $500 to use on future project-based learning activities in their classrooms.

The SLIC challenge questions for this year are in the areas of education, agriculture and global warming, and technology and robotics and are designed to be implemented in the subject areas of English/Language Arts, Science, Mathematics, and Career and Technical Education.

In preparation for this effort, two-hour training sessions will be provided in all eight regions during the month of October. This training will be available to teachers, counselors, Instructional Technology Resource Teachers (ITRTs) or other educators that will provide support to student ideation teams. For those unable to attend the in-person training, live-webinars, recorded training, and other supporting documentation and points-of-contact will be made available.

The available in-person and webinar training sessions by region are as follows (session sign-up is available as part of the SLIC registration process):