In a classroom at the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy in Atlanta, a small group of high school girls is growing vegetables—but not in any ordinary garden. After lots of tinkering, and plenty of trial-and-error, the girls have managed to turn a corner of their classroom into a miniature greenhouse they’ve designed and built themselves. Using PVC pipes and plastic sheeting for the frame, this “smart garden” uses automated sensors to water and monitor the plants. The result is a way to grow vegetables year-round, in a community where access to fresh produce isn’t always easy to come by. 

For the girls who built it, the idea for the garden started with a simple question: What’s a challenge in your hometown, and what can you create to help? The question is at the heart of the Ciena Solutions Challenge, an ongoing initiative from Ciena and Digital Promise, which invites middle- and high-school students and teachers around the globe to design unique solutions to local challenges. Awardees—like the students at the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy—are given $3,000 to sustain and scale their projects. Like the automated garden, the results have the power to transform entire communities for the better.

This kind of real-world problem-solving is at the heart of Powerful Learning, a research-based model developed by Digital Promise. Built around four core pillars of connection, agency, purpose, and curiosity, this model encourages students to see themselves as active........

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