Something about Launchpad

Location. Voice. Place. Community.

These four simple words added together prove that 1 + 1 + 1 +1 > 4. Honoring students' geography, beliefs, where they call home, and the people who are part of all three is powerful, hard work, a hard-to-come-by alchemy. The team at Launchpad, a workforce development program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania recently offered students the opportunity to explore all four in a project that culminated in a pitch competition called "Ignite," which offered students a project that embraced an authentic audience and purpose. Ignite also exemplifies how competency-based education (CBE) can support workforce development programs.

What Is Launchpad?

Launchpad is a “learn-and-earn” workforce development program that prepares students from traditionally underrepresented groups in Philadelphia for well-paying careers in tech. This first cohort is made of 35 students from 11 different high schools. The program starts in junior or senior year of high school and takes two and half years to complete. By the end of 12th grade, students can earn up to $4,000 by participating in Launchpad. After high school graduation, they will be paid a competitive wage as they move through an intensive techniand gain professional work experience with Launchpad, Inc.

Authenticity: The Driving Force

Launchpad uses Building 21’s competency-based approach to learning for what they call “studio time.” Studios are 6-12 week problem-based units designed to assess competencies often across multiple disciplines. Studios begin with a problem frame; continue with opportunities to investigate, create, and revise; and culminate with an opportunity for impact. When the Launchpad team first started designing their first studio for Launchpad 101, they designed it around a larger, hypothetical project, one that students often hear in a traditional school setting: imagine if you had X amount of dollars to solve a community problem. What would you do? The Learning Innovation Network team pushed the Launchpad team to consider ways to make the experience more authentic, for students to work on a problem they could actually solve, to have authentic impact. Ultimately, it was this authenticity that sparked the students’ interest in the project and sustained their creative fires.

What Is Authenticity?

Authenticity is related to purpose and audience. Why is the student demonstrating these skills and who are they demonstrating these skills for? There is a spectrum of authenticity, as seen below. There is no "good" or "bad" authenticity – the authenticity has to fit the project's needs. The bigger question instructional designers need to ask themselves is where are there opportunities for students to experience higher levels of authenticity in the curriculum?

What's unique about Launchpad's Ignite project is that it begins as Bounded Authentic in the summer, in Launchpad Foundations, when students:

• Identify a community they are a member of and interested in helping with tech
• Form a group of students that are interested in working with the same community
• Conduct interviews with community members and online research to better understand their community problems.(The students went above and beyond here, conducting over 100 interviews over two days!)
• Brainstorm a tech-enabled solution and build a one-pager to explain their solution and share their key result for measuring success
• Craft a slide deck for and and develop a five-minute pitch
• Practice and present their pitches with industry partners
• Participate in a program wide pitch competition where the top six teams compete in Ignite, a pitch competition in front of judges, community members, and family members. Three teams earned cash prizes to support their work in the fall.

This bounded authenticity paves the way for complex authenticity in the fall semester, where students will actually get to build and implement their tech solutions to community-based projects.

Problems Are Welcome

Authentic projects are structured around solving real problems. Launchpad students can't just create a video game because they like video games; it has to help solve a problem in their community. Nick Imparato, High School Coordinator, says,

"We wanted to ensure that students felt a clear connection that the tech skills that they were learning had the potential to create a positive impact in their community, that tech skills don't just have to be used to make a profit."

Students identified problems ranging from gaming addiction to the bus being late to the teen mental health crisis. In order to help focus their problem frame and highlight authenticity, students needed to create proposals in a one-pager format where they succinctly described the problem, the community, their research, and their solution. Here are some examples:

• Latinos in Philadelphia: a website in English and Spanish that connects Latinos in Philadelphia to resources related to healthcare, housing assistance and language comprehension.
• Launchpad B.T.S.: TikTok campaigns to recruit for Launchpad and to help current students feel more connected
• 8 Wheels for 2: a website that updates skateboarders know the cleanliness and state of equipment at skateparks around Philadelphia