Georgia Tech is affiliated with four of this year’s nine Innovation Fund partnership grants, which were announced by Governor Nathan Deal earlier this week. The $19.4 million competitive grant program was created through Georgia’s Race to the Top (RT3) plan.

Georgia Tech worked with local education authorities, charter schools, other institutions of higher education, businesses and nonprofit organizations to develop or implement high-impact programs aimed at producing positive outcomes for students.

The four Georgia Tech-affiliated grant recipients are:

• Computational Thinking: 21st Century STEM Problem-Solving Skills for Georgia Students – Georgia Tech will work with B.E. Mays High School and Tapjoy Inc. to incorporate computational thinking into high school STEM curricula, teaching students to construct models to simulate, visualize and solve real-world problems.

• Drew Charter School Partnership for Expansion – Drew Charter School; the Georgia Tech Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (GT CEISMC); the Georgia State University School of Music and others will expand Drew’s highly successful pre-K-8 STEM curriculum to grades 9-12, creating a true cradle-to-college pipeline serving inner-city students.

• Greene County STEM TLA Collaborative – Georgia Tech, Greene County Schools, University of Georgia faculty and Ed Innovation Partners seek to open a charter school in Greene County with the mission of increasing the number of students who choose STEM fields as a career.

• Rockdale 21st Century Academy of Environmental Studies – Rockdale County Schools, in partnership with GT CEISMC and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), will create a STEM-focused middle grades school that provides students with portfolio and project-based learning modules.

Written by Institute Communications student assistant Vett Vandiver. Portions were taken from the Office of the Governor's official press release.