Grant: Engage Grants Program

NoMoreAllowance is a Canadian company that has developed a project-based entrepreneurial training programfor youth. This program emphasizes critical and abstract thinking skills, and encourages innovation. Youth areinspired and guided to create technology-based solutions that are replicable, scalable, and sustainable. At thecurrent stage, expertise is required to manually create different curricula specifically for different children. Thisrequires/involves a tremendous amount of manpower. It is critical to automate this task. The task of this projectwill be the development of an automatic system that can be used to develop scalable digital curricula forchildren with different profiles/skill levels. If it succeeds, it will greatly increase the scalability of the company,allowing franchisees/licensees to run a high quality integrated program.Each student's critical and abstract thought processes are unique. We have to make the customizationsoftware tailor itself to these unique thought processes, evolving as the student evolves and allowing eachstudent to reach their full learning potential. This requires the development of proper modeling and learningapproaches, creation of a digital curriculum to overarch the concepts of critical thinking that are necessary andbeneficial to all learning processes, creation of a complementary/relative database of lesson plan options, aswell as the development of a proper practice for integrating a scalability component that addresses expansion ofthe lesson plan database.Research shows that youth entering the workforce have declining graduation rates, innovation initiative, andbasic employment readiness [14, p84]. These skills, acquired through NMA, are best addressed before highschool, when young people are most receptive [5, p9]. Research also shows that ""basic skill sets such ascommunications, professionalism/work ethic and critical thinking/problem solving [are] the types of skillstaught in many business skills training programs."" [8, p427].