Competitions have long been a powerful tool for fostering innovation, creativity, and engagement. Science Fairs have been around since the early 1900s and many other established educational competitions have existed for decades. Whether it’s a hackathon, a science challenge, or a creative arts contest, competitions provide participants with opportunities to showcase their talents, learn new skills, and connect with like-minded individuals. However, the formal education system still puts barriers in the way of educators fully leveraging the potential of these programs.

Many educators don’t know that anyone can use a competition to turn their traditional lecture-based classroom into an exciting challenge-based experience. The Institute of Competition Sciences is here to help leverage existing competitions and create competitions of your own to harness the incredible power of these programs. Whether you’re an old-hat at participating in competitions, or completely new to the model, you can set up competitions for your classroom, school, or district that completely change the way your students look at learning.

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Why Are Competitions Valuable?

Competitions create an environment of excitement and achievement for participants. They encourage learning through active challenges, teamwork, and real-world problem-solving, offering benefits far beyond what we see in traditional lecture-based classrooms such as:

• Enhancing Engagement and Motivation: Competitions energize students and spark their creativity, transforming routine activities into extraordinary experiences.
• Celebrating Excellence: Recognizing participants’ efforts and talents inspires confidence and promotes a culture of achievement.
• Providing Alternatives to Traditional Assessment: Competitions can replace the rigidity of grades with dynamic scoring rubrics, providing a more comprehensive evaluation of skills.
• Increasing Educational Outcomes: From honing critical thinking to fostering collaboration, competitions offer diverse benefits that enrich educational experiences.

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How do you set up a competition?

Hosting a competition typically involves several key steps. If you’re interested in creating a challenge or student competition at any level, follow these simple steps to get started:

1. Define a set of goals and the audience you want to engage.

The first step in hosting a competition, whether it’s just for your own classroom, or for students across the world, is to clearly define your goals and target audience. Are you looking to inspire innovation and critical thinking, improve specific workforce skills, or promote a specific area of learning? Begin by identifying the educational, social, or organizational goals you want to achieve. ICS offers strategy consultations to help organizations analyze their options and identify the best path forward.

2. Design the Competition Structure

Once your goals are established, you need to design boundaries and structure your competition by creating rules, an operations plan, and a marketing strategy. Particularly, think about what you want your students to do in the competition. How do you ensure that all of your students can get something out of participating? Make sure there are ways to engage and measure outcomes. ICS can help set up the structure to fit the specific goals you have identified.

3. Develop Submission Items

Once you have an overall structure, determine what participants will create, solve, or present to demonstrate their new skills. What are you asking the students to create and submit? Do you want to measure their presentation skills? Make sure you have a requirement to submit a video presentation. Do you want to make sure they demonstrate knowledge of certain robotic or mathematics techniques? Have students design a mathematical model, or code up a robot to conduct certain tasks.

4. Design Scoring Criteria

Build connections between submission items and outcomes, ensuring a clear path for evaluation. Once you know what outcomes you want for your students, and what submission items will help them demonstrate those outcomes, you need to create a scoring rubric and a set of specific criteria to evaluate them on. These can provide a stand-in for traditional grades and are a much more effective and accurate way of evaluating skills gained and other outcomes.

5. Evaluate and Improve

Continually improve the competition design to maximize its effectiveness. Don’t just think on your first iteration you have the best way to conduct the competition. Talk to some students, talk to fellow educators (talk to ICS!) and learn more about best-practices in competition design to help make sure you are going to get the desired outcomes from what you’ve put together. Also, after the competition concludes, make sure to evaluate the outcomes and identify areas for improvement. This helps ensure that future competitions are even more successful.

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Use the ICS Competition Management Platform to Make it Easy

The ICS platform has been used to host a wide range of competitions, each with its own unique impact. For example:

• Plant the Moon Challenge: This competition engages students in exploring lunar regolith and its potential for supporting plant growth. Over 10,000 students a year participate in the PTMC.
• Modeling the Future Challenge: Participants analyze real-world data and develop recommendations on how to mitigate risks.
• Virtual Supreme Court: Teams of students simulate Supreme Court cases, honing their legal and analytical skills.

These competitions not only inspire participants but also achieve broader goals such as workforce development, community engagement, and innovation. The ICS platform is available for anyone interested in hosting an educational competition.

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The ICS Competition Management Platform will help you by streamlining key components of your competition that could otherwise take up a lot of your time. The platform has been custom designed to help create and manage educational competitions based on decades of experience managing our own programs at ICS. We’ve found the pain points and the needs that will help you and your students get the most out of your competition. From recruiting participants and setting up milestones, to scoring submissions and selecting winners, that ICS platform streamlines every aspect of competition management. Reach out to us to learn how you can use it with your class, school, or district!

Visit the ICS website to learn more about hosting a competition and schedule a free run through of your competition design and goals with our expert team!