Student Innovations Related to COVID-19: The International Engineering Design Challenge |Biomedgrid

At the start of 2020, online education experienced a significant increase as educators attempted to mitigate a total stop to learning, fearing their students might lose a critical year of their educational experience. This rise in e-learning, affected by school closures, challenged educators to develop meaningful and timely learning experiences that were accessible and realizable for all their students while at the same time consider diverse digital equity issues affecting full participation. Their drive to increase the learning potentials of their students was a testimony to teachers' commitment to the students they serve. It also highlighted educators' sense of responsibility for the academic and social well-being of their students, many of which were negotiating new learning environments at home. This paper describes student involvement in the COVID-19 Engineering Design Challenge, an international Phenomenon-based Learning (PhBL) project developed to provide students in primary, secondary, and higher education learning environments with an opportunity to think about and reflect on challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and to develop and share their STEM solutions globally.