Nancy Conrad, 2018 FETC presenter, created the Conrad Foundation in 2008 to energize and engage students in science and technology through unique entrepreneurial opportunities. The organization’s flagship program, the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge, is a global competition challenging students to combine education, innovation and entrepreneurship to create products that address real-world challenges and global sustainability.
As the founder and leader of the Conrad Foundation, Nancy Conrad sees her mission as inspiring young minds to design their futures in the fields of aerospace, energy, cybertech, and health. She dreams of a global community of students across all cultures, national lines, barriers, and obstacles that will embrace her “No Box Thinking” philosophy that’s dedicated to inspirational and competency-based learning.
The Conrad Foundation’s Conrad Design Method was created to help students across the globe to learn how to think and solve the problems they face in their worlds by providing them with an organic STEM framework with communication and collaboration tools to inspire innovation and entrepreneurship. It allows students and teachers to co-create and co-mentor with each other. As Nancy says, “When you open up an opportunity for young minds to solve challenges, you’ve opened up a whole new way to learn and to inspire.”
The ultimate goal of the Conrad Foundation is to utilize the available tech that is such an intricate part of a student’s life today to grow a framework that can be used in classrooms around the world.
Nancy believes that by including the voice of young people in this dialog and debate, we can speed up the building of the framework, providing faster solutions to the challenges of the world. A quicker, more efficient collaborative process that not only thinks outside the box but approaches innovation without a proverbial box anywhere close to the conversation. Nancy wants to tie in the creativity and “unbounded nature” of young people to open up a whole new way of thinking that inspires solutions to the challenges of everyday life.
For more information about Nancy’s FETC sessions click here
Listen to the full interview here: edcircuit.com
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