To address the inequality in educational opportunities provided to children of lower income areas and school districts, this project is designed to harness the potential of young minds, and provide resources to inspire and encourage pursuit of further education and the largest ambitions of these students. Through its student organization, the Cognitive Science Student Association, the team has developed and piloted an engaging neuroscience course designed for elementary and middle school students. The lesson is entitled “Feel Real Brains” and lasts approximately one hour in length. At each lesson, a hand full of UC Berkeley students will come into a classroom, and give an interactive lesson on what it means to study neuroscience, and all the ways the brain affects health, thoughts, and daily life. This project proposes to expand the existing program. In addition to coordinating and facilitating its outreach efforts between schools, the team seeks to design a website through which teachers, students, or parents can submit requests for lessons to visit their school.
SeedEd Capital’s mission is to provide responsible funding alternatives for disadvantaged students in Alameda County interested in pursuing higher education and to provide an impactful service opportunity for UC Berkeley students. Through a loan-based program, accompanied with mentoring, tutoring, and professional development curricula, promising high school students in the Oakland community will be selected as Seeds and supported financially and emotionally through their academic endeavors. In an attempt to reduce the lack of access to education, SeedEd will support students that show promise during high school and provide a holistic mechanism that will accompany them from high school until the culmination of higher education. The organization will take advantage of crowd-funding to support its financial needs and obligations and simultaneously use Shared Income Agreements as a source of revenue and sustainability.
This project seeks to implement a two-day “UC Berkeley Financial Literacy and Economic Justice” Conference, an annual, campus-wide event open to all college students. It will be the first student-led and student-organize conference of its kind. On the first day of the conference, facilitators from dozens of student organizations, UC Berkeley faculty, and community partners will host a projected thirty lectures and workshops on various aspects of financial literacy and topics on socioeconomic inequality. Core workshop topics will include preparing a tax return, planning a personal budget, navigating student financial aid, and tackling the rising cost of tuition and housing. Students can opt to do public service around the Berkeley/Oakland area in pilot groups focusing on how to apply financial literacy skills to needy communities. Students may also choose to directly engage with student organizations and community partners on specific financial needs such as having their taxes filed for free. Finally, attendees will reflect on the entire conference — workshops, public service, keynote — in specially moderated groups by conference organizers.
sideProject would like to introduce the new-age resume: a dynamic, “3-D” professional profile that not only displays work history but also demonstrates employability skills. Currently, the resume as a job application tool limits applicants from displaying their full capabilities and restricts employers from getting a holistic view of their candidates. This project is reinventing the resume by creating a networking platform that enables users to showcase their skill sets through small “Projects.” A Project resembles a case competition or company-sponsored contest with a prize incentive that requires users to submit proposals to a live business problem within a given time frame. Each Project will be individually designed with a sponsor, and coded with the set of skills necessary for a complete proposal. Upon submission, the sponsor’s logo and corresponding skills will be linked to the student’s profile (AKA their 3D resume) as recognition for their work. sideProject arms students with the tools to realize their own potential and more accurately reflect their individual skill sets.
Catalyst@Berkeley is one of the first student-led health-tech incubators geared towards enabling undergraduate students to solve tomorrow’s biggest health problems. The goals for Catalyst are to bring passionate students together to create heavily-needed health-tech products to market and improve lives. It teaches student-founders how to pick the right problems to solve (clinically-validated and with the right product-market-team fit). By the end of the incubation period, all teams are expected to be ready to scale with a top-tier accelerator program. Most importantly, Catalyst wants to provide students the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship in the life sciences and digital health fields through hands-on experience.
Due to state budget cuts, many California public high schools have cut their college counseling programs. As a result, many high school students have limited access to information regarding college admissions. This is most prevalent in underserved and impoverished areas of the state. There are many bright and talented students who are capable of succeeding at top universities but lack information and guidance. The Phoenix Scholars aims to fill that gap. The program will provide one-on-one mentorship between UC Berkeley students and high school seniors throughout the State of California to provide them with personalized help. The Phoenix Scholars will strive to provide a constant source of support for mentees through the whirlwind that is the college application process.
Berkeley Engineers and Mentors (BEAM) is planning a program to develop, test, and implement project-based learning (PBL) curriculum in local schools. PBL is a nation-wide educational movement that aims to expose students to real-world challenges while emphasizing teamwork, communication of ideas, self-discovery, student-initiated learning, and creative approaches to problems. BEAM wants to join this movement by first pioneering a classroom curriculum model for PBL teaching that BEAM can implement in its own sites and then ultimately compile into an easily-utilized “BEAM Box” for broader use.
CloudCreations will be the platform through which innovative and effective educational tools can work together simultaneously and seamlessly. This platform is for students to collaborate, create, and compete. The collaboration will occur inside and outside the classroom and will be customized for students depending on whether or not they are in class and what they are specifically collaborating on with their friends and classmates. The creation will occur mostly outside the classroom where students will be able to vote on the most useful resources submitted by students. The platform will allow students to create videos, infographics, example problems, helpful scenarios, problem solution walkthroughs, etc.
The three main functions of the LuxWalk application are as follows. First, students can input their origin and destination on an app built into the application to find the safest route to walk, produced through an analysis of past crime data and the degree of street lighting. Second, students can also track the Night Safety shuttle and campus-funded Community Service Officers through the BearWalk program to gain estimates on when and where they can plan to dispatch a shuttle or officer. Third, students can connect to the application through their Facebook accounts, to see which friends are checked in at their location and are walking to the same geographical area. Ultimately, LuxWalk serves to connect students with information about Berkeley neighborhoods, campus-facilitated night safety programs, and fellow students in their community who can facilitate safety in numbers while traveling at night.
