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The purpose of science competitions or science fairs in STEM education is to provide students with opportunities to experience and practice science as it is practiced and experienced in the real world. The Innovate to Mitigate project hosts an annual open innovation challenge for students aged 13-18 to develop methods for mitigating global warming. Over several weeks, students innovate, develop prototype solutions, and engage with peers and with scientists online about their developing ideas. Finally, they submit videos and papers for discussion and judging by a panel of scientists. Submissions over the past few years have included projects over a wide range of domains, for example, energy conservation, renewable energy, agricultural innovations, or social/behavioral change. Framing learning goals for science fairs and science competitions around phenomena that are meaningful to young people offers the opportunity to make direct connections to relevant science and to understand how science is useful in society. We offer suggestions based on what we have learned that provide multiple ways for teachers to begin to support students in learning and effectively using the science practices. Carefully designed competition environments can reveal students as effective problem-solvers, unleash their imaginations, and help them to innovate. 

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper presents evidence that the web-mediated communities of practice support learning of STEM concepts and practices and provides an account of how student and scientist discourse support that learning. Productive talk deployed by community members elicited greater levels of reasoning than was originally manifest in student work and resulted in improved student products. 

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students. Students are charged with designing feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper draws on data from 3 project teams. The paper presents evidence that a web-mediated community of practice supports STEM learning of concepts and STEM practices and examines conditions under which the environment can enable an account of microgenesis of that learning.