Kids Engineer the Darndest Things

There’s nothing like optimistic, hard-working teenagers to give you hope for the future, so it brightened my day to discover digitalopen.org and see how youth are making up ways that technology can improve the world.

Digital Open is an online community built around the idea that young people can contribute technological innovations to help solve global problems. It’s also a contest calling on folks 17 and younger to submit open-technology projects in eight categories. The technology luminaries judging the contest will pick winners based on “creativity, practicality and overall awesomeness.” Projects must be free and open as defined in any of the licenses approved by freedomdefined.org, Affero GPL v.2 or CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Categories are code, community, discovery, earth, entrepreneurs, gear, media and play. Projects need not be 100-percent complete to qualify—in fact, posting projects in early stages helps inventors benefit from Digital Open’s collaborative environment, including advice from volunteer stewards worldwide. Recent submissions are diverse:

• User iPavel created Earthpedia, an encyclopedia with its articles plotted onto a 3-D model of a globe with layered surfaces, including political, tectonic and time zones.
• onix’s The Products of Beekeeping is a presentation that aims to persuade processed-food lovers to switch to natural sweets.
• kcimple’s GAMES_FOR_CHANGE is a maze-style game in which a high school freshman must make it to first period while avoiding bullies. (I noticed several high school-survival themed submissions.)
• Frustrated that school software often works only on Microsoft Windows, unikoid is creating and testing FreEdu, an open-source education software that can present materials, conduct tests and keep journals for individuals.

The deadline for projects submitted in English is Aug. 15, so if you know a young maker, spread the word. I can’t wait catch more glimpses of the future by watching what pops up on Digital Open’s projects page.