Schools across the nation shut down weeks ago to help combat the spread of COVID-19, which means many teens are sitting idle with little to keep their brains engaged.
That's where local education tech company Ascend comes in.
Ascend was founded in Charlotte in 2019 by Reg Gabriel and Christine Nicodemus to help schools and mentoring organizations set goals for middle and high school students, track their progress and measure program outcomes.
Missi Rossi, Ascend's director of school and student success, said Ascend recently launched a free, public version of the platform called Challenge Accepted! The platform is aimed at keeping teens engaged while they're stuck at home due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Rossi said the company was already working on new platform features that would allow organizations to send new goals to students, so it made sense to open up accessibility.
"When everything happened with (COVID-19), it dovetailed nicely with the new challenge feature," she said. "We began brainstorming ways to support students and schools and realized we could open up our platform to the public."
Rossi said at ascendgoals.com, students can sign up for a variety of challenges that will academically engage the physical, mental, social and emotional needs they may face while stuck at home during the pandemic.
Students across the country have accepted more than 1,500 challenges since the free platform launched less than a month ago.
"Our company's mission is to cultivate a generation of students who follow their goals with curiosity, courage and commitment," Rossi said. "Those things might feel restricted now, and it might seem as if they’re not able to do the things they want to do. We're giving them tools to find alternatives to exploring things they may be interested in."
Challenges run the gamut, from museum tours to virtual volunteering, coding and language classes to letter-writing campaigns. Each completed challenge earns a student anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 points, Rossi said.
Once a student accumulates 10,000 points, he or she is entered into a weekly drawing for one of two $500 college scholarships funded by the Steven Smith Family Foundation, as well as individual donors.
Rossi said two of the first four scholarship winners were North Carolinians from Charlotte and Greensboro, and the others were from Texas and Tennessee.
"We think these challenges in this current environment are really helping kids have a startup mindset," she said. "They have to look at it like, 'There’s a problem I'm facing. How am I able to overcome that hurdle?'"
