The Fellowship, which was active between 2015-2018, was designed to create innovative solutions to and a community of problem-solvers focused on a specific topic. This initiative was a rigorous six-month collaborative learning experience whereby partner teams worked elbow-to-elbow with other STEM leaders, peers, and experts at three in-person events, receiving virtual coaching between events. At the end, partners submitted competing applications for funding through the 100Kin10 Challenge Grant.

In 2015, the Bay Area Discovery Museum was among the first cohort of 100Kin10 fellows. This group was focused on finding new ways to bring engineering education to K-12 classrooms across the country. Irina Thompson, former Foundation & Government Relations Manager at the Museum noted:

BADM and the 10 other teams spent two days brainstorming, digging deeply into the question: “Where are the barriers to having high quality engineering teaching in our schools?”. This brainstorming session enabled the BADM team to come up with the idea for a mobile engineering lab. They went home armed with targeted homework and tested their idea with teachers themselves. Their extensive testing and the collaborative work guided by the 100Kin10 team helped the team develop and refine their new idea into a working concept over the intervening months. They came back to New York to pitch their idea, received some feedback, and submitted their final proposal for a mobile engineering lab to take the Museum’s engaging engineering program to pre-K through fifth grade teachers working in underserved communities across the Bay Area. In the end, the project was awarded a $380,000 grant.

Elizabeth Rood, former Director of Education and the Center for Childhood Creativity at BADM noted: