The academic environment has historically been somewhat slow to implement and adopt new technologies. However, developments in video games have created an opportunity for students to learn new skills and topics through nontraditional mediums of education. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the need for flexible learning opportunities. Joystick Education is our approach to addressing this need. Through online, game-based tutoring and a database of video games with high educational value, Joystick Education creates a learning environment that is effective, fun, and engaging for students. We analyzed popular, mainstream video games for educational content and selected nine games that teach concepts like history, biology, or physics while playing the game. Through promotion on social media, we generated buzz around our website which led to 103 unique visitors over our first month online and two customers requesting to book our tutoring service. We are confident that given more time to grow, Joystick Education can generate profit and become a successful business.

Though about 75 percent of American waste is recyclable, only 30 percent of it is actually recycled and less than ten percent of plastics disposed of in the United States in 2015 were recycled. A statistic like this demonstrates the immense need to increase recycling rates in order to move towards cultivating a circular economy and benefiting the environment. With Arizona State University’s (ASU) extensive population of on-campus students and faculty, our team was determined to create a solution that would increase recycling rates. After conducting initial market research, our team incentives or education. We conducted market research through student surveys to determine the level of knowledge of our target audience and barriers to entry for local recycling and composting resources. Further, we gained insight into the medium of recycling and sustainability programs they would be interested in participating in. Overall, the results of our surveys demonstrated that a majority of students were interested in participating in these programs, if they were not already involved, and most students on-campus already had access to these resources. Despite having access to these sustainable practices, we identified a knowledge gap between students and their information on how to properly execute sustainable practices such as composting and recycling. In order to address this audience, our team created Circulearning, an educational program that aims to bridge the gap of knowledge and address immediate concerns regarding circular economy topics. By engaging audiences through our quick, accessible educational modules and teaching them about circular practices, we aim to inspire everyone to implement these practices into their own lives. Though our team began the initiative with a focus on implementing these practices solely to ASU campus, we decided to expand our target audience to implement educational programs at all levels after discovering the interest and need for this resource in our community. Our team is extremely excited that our Circulearning educational modules have been shared with a broad audience including students at Mesa Skyline High School, ASU students, and additional connections outside of ASU. With Circulearning, we will educate and inspire people of all ages to live more sustainably and better the environment in which we live.

For as long as humans have been working, they have been looking for ways to get that work done better, faster, and more efficient. Over the course of human history, mankind has created innumerable spectacular inventions, all with the goal of making the economy and daily life more efficient. Today, innovations and technological advancements are happening at a pace like never seen before, and technology like automation and artificial intelligence are poised to once again fundamentally alter the way people live and work in society. Whether society is prepared or not, robots are coming to replace human labor, and they are coming fast. In many areas artificial intelligence has disrupted entire industries of the economy. As people continue to make advancements in artificial intelligence, more industries will be disturbed, more jobs will be lost, and entirely new industries and professions will be created in their wake. The future of the economy and society will be determined by how humans adapt to the rapid innovations that are taking place every single day. In this paper I will examine the extent to which automation will take the place of human labor in the future, project the potential effect of automation to future unemployment, and what individuals and society will need to do to adapt to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology. I will also look at the history of automation in the economy. For centuries humans have been advancing technology to make their everyday work more productive and efficient, and for centuries this has forced humans to adapt to the modern technology through things like training and education. The thesis will additionally examine the ways in which the U.S. education system will have to adapt to meet the demands of the advancing economy, and how job retraining programs must be modernized to prepare workers for the changing economy.

English Learners (ELs) in mainstream classrooms must overcome additional language barriers to comprehend and master Common Core State Standards in mathematics. I will be working as a teacher after graduation who will provide content-based instruction to ELs in Spain and Phoenix, AZ. As someone who will be graduating with non-education degrees but working in education, it is imperative that I understand the best methods to create a conducive learning environment for simultaneous L2 acquisition and content comprehension. After reviewing previous research, I identified multiple methods that assist ELs in simultaneously acquiring classroom content and improving English Language Proficiency (ELP). I have used these methods to construct three lesson plans that teach three mathematics standards and corresponding ELP standards for third-grade students in Arizona. I analyzed the methods that were used in my lesson plans and expanded upon how they will enhance ELP for ELs in my classroom. I have concluded my report by identifying some shifts in Common Core State Standards and the implications that these shifts have for ELs in mainstream classrooms.

Schools across the United States have been subject to a rise in violent incidents since 2013. Reading about school shootings, racist acts, and violent demonstrations in schools has unfortunately become commonplace, which is contributing to inequitable outcomes for some student populations. These equity gaps have triggered demands for more equitable solutions in schools, a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of stakeholders like school governing boards, principals, and parents.

Chandler Unified School District (CUSD), a large school system in Arizona that serves 45,000 students from preschool through high school, has been unable to escape similar structural and frictional inequities within its schools. One instance of a racially charged student performance at Santan Middle School motivated CUSD to take a more immediate look at equity in the district. It is during this response that our team of New Venture Group consultants engaged with Matt Strom, Assistant Superintendent of CUSD, in analyzing the important question of “how CUSD can take steps towards closing equity gaps within the district?”

CUSD defines an equity gap as any difference in student opportunity, achievement, discipline, attendance, etc. contributable to a student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Currently, certain student populations in CUSD perform vastly different academically and receive different opportunities within schools, but as was our problem statement, CUSD is aiming to reduce (and eventually close) these gaps.

Our team approached this problem in three phases: (1) diagnosis, (2) solution creation, and (3) prevention. In phase one, we created a dashboard to help principals easily and visually identify gaps by toggling parameters on the dashboard. Phase two focused on the generation of recommendations for closing gaps. To achieve this goal, a knowledge of successful gap-closing strategies will be paired with the dashboard. In our final phase, the team of consultants created a principal scorecard to ensure equity remains a priority for principals.

For my thesis, I chose to write a children’s book on financial education. The purpose of the book is to introduce financial terms such as savings, loans, and opportunity cost into a child’s life. The goal of the book is to inspire young individuals to start having open discussions about their finances and what these terms mean as well as how it applies to their daily lives.

The inspiration of the book came from my personal upbringing. I was born and raised in Mesa, Arizona, where I would see title loans businesses in every street corner. Many close family friends grew a dependency on these loans. As I grew older, I became aware of the long-term effects these businesses had on these families and I became inspired to make a change.

My book is meant to introduce simple financial terms into a child’s life with the hopes that they will begin to converse with family and friends about these terms. My book specifically incorporates the terms: loans, opportunity costs, savings, and affordability. These four topics were chosen through surveying a high school class by gathering information such as what they know, how much they know, and what they would like to learn more about. The intended audience would be students reading at a 3rd grade reading level. This grade level is ideal for my book based off information found on the Arizona Department of Education’s website. Final revisions were done with the help of my committee as well as through feedback received from children.

The book itself is 31 pages long with illustrations on every page. The illustrations consist of photographs and drawings. The drawings were purposely placed, roughly, and without color, on the photographs to symbolize the rough patches in life in yet a colorful world.

Proposition 1184 plays a major role in the future of my book. Proposition 1184 is
currently working its way through the Arizona legislature and would require all high school students to take a class on financial basics, replacing the current economics class requirement. I plan to continue working with Mesa Public Schools to get my book, or a similar project, incorporated into the Mesa Public Schools curriculum. I envision the book starting discussions related to financial topics which will in turn familiarize children with these terms’ definitions and begin the movement of financial education in Arizona.

The returns to education in Haiti are high. Nevertheless, few individuals receive/enjoy them because education is privately provided, costly, and the poor cannot afford it. The poor receive too little education and would benefit from investing more into their education however, they cannot do so because they are unable to borrow, which can be attributed to the poorly functioning credit markets. Therefore, there is a need for government policy intervention aimed at providing more education to the poor. The purpose of this study is to propose and evaluate economic policies that might help the poor obtain more education. In particular, I analyze a taxation policy that redistributes income from the rich to the poor by implementing a tax transfer program. I also analyze a tax policy that taxes only the rich and used the tax revenue generated to fund public education for all children age 5-14. In the first policy, a tax rate of 3.17% on the rich and transfer to the poor increases the income of the poor parents by $81.74 USD a year and the income of the poor child by $61.78 USD while decreasing the income of the rich child by $61.78 USD. The second policy varies the amount parents and the government spend on a children's education and analyzes the effects on a children's income. I find that a fairly modest tax on the rich does a good job at generating more education for the poor, increasing the income of the poor children, and therefore alleviating the poverty of the poor. For example, a 5.21% tax on the top 20% of the rich raises enough money to provide six years of free public education for all children. As a result, the child's income in the poorest 20% of families raises from $539.30 to $887.14. These findings suggest that public education is likely an important channel through which the extent of poverty in Haiti can be reduced.

Education is a very sensitive topic when it comes to implementing the right policies. From professionals well-versed in the topic, to the very students who are being taught, feedback for reform is constantly being addressed. Nonetheless, there remains a large gap between the performance of some of the most advanced countries in the world and the United States of America. As it stands today, USA is arguably the most technologically advanced country and the outright leader of the free market. For over a century this nation has been exceeding expectations in nearly every industry known to man and aiding the rest of the world in their endeavors for a higher standard of living. Yet, there seems to be something critically wrong with the way a large majority of the younger generation are growing up. How can a country so respected in the world fall so far behind in what is considered the basics of human education: math and science? The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a series of assessments taken by countries all around the world to determine the strength of their youth's knowledge. Since its inception in 1995, TIMSS has been conducted every four years with an increasing number of participating countries and students each time. In 1999 U.S. eighth-graders placed #19 in the world for mathematics and #18 for science (Appendix Fig. 1). In the years following, and further detailed in the thesis, the U.S. managed to improve the overall performance by a small margin but still remained a leg behind countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, and more. Clearly these countries were doing something right as they consistently managed to rank in the top tier. Over the course of this paper we will observe and analyze why and how Singapore has topped the TIMSS list for both math and science nearly every time it has been administered over the last two decades. What is it that they are teaching their youth that enables them to perform exceptionally above the norm? Why is it that we cannot use their techniques as a guideline to increase the capabilities of our future generations? We look to uncover the teaching methods of what is known as Singapore Math and how it has helped students all over the world. By researching current U.S. schools that have already implemented the system and learning about their success stories, we hope to not only educate but also persuade the local school districts on why integrating Singapore Math into their curriculum will lead to the betterment of the lives of thousands of children and the educational threshold of this great nation.

Millennial involvement levels in the stock market are startlingly low. But what has caused this disconnect between America's younger generation and the financial sector? Stress from past financial crises, distrust of Wall Street, corporate greed, or a dislike of capitalism could surely all be viable culprits. Through our mutual experiences and research, however, we have found that most millennials aren't cynical anarchists avoiding the stock market in an attempt to fight against the system. Rather, they are individuals who have the desire to learn about investing but are clueless as to where/how to start. We both began investing in the stock market early in our college careers by opening online brokerage accounts and developing investment portfolios based on knowledge we learned within our Finance degrees and through independent research. Word of our involvement in the stock market began to spread in our social circles and people would consistently approach either of us and ask a variety of questions regarding investing. Questions such as: Can you sit down and help me open up an account and pick some stocks? What type of things do you invest in? How do I get started? How much money have you made? (always a favorite). Pre-med students, engineers, business, science, and technology majors alike all showed interest in the stock market. The more and more we talked to people, the more we realized that the problem was not a lack of desire or a lack of intellect. The problem was a lack of logically presented information, and barriers to entry that were far too high. We want to fix that. Investnet will be an online educational platform that will teach anyone the basics of investing, in plain, easy to understand terms. Whether the individual has absolutely zero knowledge of finances, or has some familiarity with investing, Investnet will provide them with the knowledge and confidence necessary to start investing in the stock market (or choose not to, but at least they'll know how).