Ingenuity Project

The Ingenuity Project has worked in collaboration with the Baltimore City Public School System since 1993 to provide its brightest middle school students with a free, highly accelerated, and challenging mathematics, science, and technology curriculum. The Ingenuity Project is a non-profit organization that works to prepare highly capable and motivated students to achieve at nationally competitive levels. 

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The Ingenuity Project is a joint effort of the Baltimore City Public School System, the Abell Foundation, and Baltimore's science and mathematics community. The Ingenuity Project is the only comprehensive, advanced math and science instructional program for gifted and advanced children in grades 6-12 in Baltimore City that offers positive, demonstrated student achievement outcomes. Ingenuity’s math and science curriculum is not a supplement to existing math and science instruction, but a year round, comprehensive math and science curriculum.

The Abell Foundation established the Ingenuity Project as a champion for learning in science and mathematics. The project began by accepting a highly able group of sixth grade students at two middle schools who embarked on a rigorous program to accelerate learning and prepare them for high school. The high school program at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, followed in 1997. 

That program, for motivated students who excel in mathematics and science, has produced students who have qualified for the Siemens Westinghouse Competition and the Intel Science Talent Search finals. Graduates have been successful at such notable institutions as the Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the twenty-five-year history of INGENUITY, programs have been launched--and some closed--at varied middle schools to meet the needs of students that the project serves. The curriculum, faculty, and staff at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute has evolved to “raise the bar” in preparing highly competitive students for what is now called STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

"The Ingenuity STEM Capstone project gave my students freedom to figure something out where the answers weren't given by me. Students had an opportunity to engage in a long realistic problem solving activity and see the fruit of their labor at the end of the process. Without the support and resources provided for this project, I would not have considered taking on such a challenging project with my students. " - Ingenuity Project Teacher  

"The STEM Capstone project helped me learn by actually making a prototype instead of reading from worksheets or a textbook. I thought the trial and error process during the experimentation part was the most fun. I got to learn a lot about working in a group and listening to others ideas." - Ingenuity Project Student

Find out more at their website.

Links:
Baltimore Style Magazine: Masters of Invention
ABC Channel 2: Kids Encouraged to Invent
STAR Democrat: STEM students designing solutions to city runoff
Baltimore City Schools (video): Girls in the STEM World