Written by Alice Carter

This is the second in this series about our sandboxes. If you haven’t already, read about our approach to experimentation. 

Across the Hub, we’re proponents of using our tools and approaches on our own thinking. For innovation, that meant testing the assumptions we were making about how and if the sandboxes would work. Continue reading “Sandboxes: Testing the strategy in Malawi” →

Lea Simpson
Director of Innovation, EdTech Hub

What’s a sandbox you ask? First in the series, this blog explains what you need to know about the Hub’s approach to experimentation and innovation.

A sandbox is a real-life location used for experimentation. As you might have imagined, a sandbox creates a small and contained space to test with a proposed intervention. It allows us to safely learn and adapt in a small space before rolling out promising ideas more widely. The term itself comes from software engineering and was originally used to describe a space that allowed developers to safely test new code before using it across the board.

We hope you saw our recent blog post responding to questions we often get about interesting large-scale EdTech initiatives. Another question we are often asked is: “What EdTech research should I know about?” 

As Sara’s blog post explains, one of the Hub’s core spheres of work is research, so we ourselves are very interested in the answer to this question. Katy’s latest blog post explains how the Hub’s research programme is addressing this question through a literature review to create a foundation for further research.  While the literature review is in progress, we thought we would share an initial list of EdTech papers that we often reach for. At the Hub we are fortunate enough to have authors of several papers on this list as members of our team. 

During the EdTech Hub’s inception phase so far, one question we hear a lot is: “What interesting or notable EdTech initiatives are you seeing?” Another question usually follows: “Which ones are reaching scale?”

This week we have joined the global education community in London for the Education World Forum and BETT meetings. This is a chance for education leaders and decision-makers to come together to discuss and share how best to improve and accelerate learning outcomes. In the spirit of sharing ideas, we thought we would put forth some examples of large-scale EdTech initiatives that are on our radar.