CTF Accelerator

In partnership with the Calgary Board of Education, MindFuel's CTF Accelerator gives students the chance to explore their interests and passions through hands-on experiences, providing them with opportunities to solve real-world challenges by using iterative problem solving and rapid prototyping. We match classes with community mentors who provide students with feedback and share insights about future career possibilities. This program is open to all schools within the Calgary area.

Bringing Rapid Prototyping &
Community Innovators to Learning

The CTF Accelerator is a semester-long program for teachers that are interested in CTF task design that promotes the meaningful and authentic exploration of occupational areas through real world challenges. Through this program, teachers will learn to use rapid prototyping methods with their students to go through multiple cycles of the plan, create, appraise, communicate learning process using a non-linear approach, and connect with various community partners who are engaged in innovative work across multiple career clusters.

Impact

  • Positioning task design to integrate at least two occupational areas through real world challenges
  • Supporting students with an opportunity to experience the interconnectedness of skills, knowledge, and technologies associated with various occupational areas
  • Teachers developing their pedagogy to create flexible and interdisciplinary learning environments
  • Encouraging the use of meaningful, hands-on challenges to develop relevant learning experiences for students
  • Supporting teachers in building strong competency-based assessment practices
  • Positioning learning beyond the classroom; creating a community of teachers, students, experts, and local innovators
Over the past two years, we have impacted:

Students

Teachers

Schools

Student Testimonials

  • “I was surprised at the rapid prototyping techniques. We are often taught that the final product is the most important, and oftentimes I'll focus on the final product rather than prototypes. However, through rapid prototyping I learned how easy and helpful prototyping can be.”

  • “This program has surprisingly showed me different ways to approach not only design thinking problems, but also being more creative in answering questions in my daily life.”

  • “The fact that rapid prototyping can be so cheap and uses items that you see in everyday life was very eye opening to me. I always thought that prototypes were just smaller versions of a product, but they are much more important than I thought.”

Program Suppport

Special thanks to our generous partners for their support