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A New Challenge to Innovate for Duke students

The Duke STEAM Challenge invites students from disparate backgrounds and interest areas to team up to innovate.

A new Duke initiative challenges students from disparate backgrounds to pool their expertise to solve problems. And there's a real payoff for the teams that do it best.


The Duke STEAM Challenge is open to undergraduate, graduate and professional students alike, and the winning team will take home $10,000. The second- and third-place teams will win $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.


The challenge: Develop an project over the fall and winter of 2013 that emphasizes a mix of scholarly disciplines. Projects will be showcased in January 2014. Students are expected to compete in teams of between 2 and 5 members each.


"If someone had told Leonardo da Vinci, Newton or Galileo that the study of science in the 21st century would be separated from the creativity of the arts or the social, cultural and historical insights into human behavior offered by the humanities, they would have wondered what scientists had done to make the wold disrespect them so much," said Cathy Davidson, a Duke English professor co-leading the challenge with Keith Whitfield, Duke's vice provost for academic affairs. "It's an odd idea to separate out different kinds of knowledge that inspire and enrich one another in the real world and the virtual too. We want to challenge students to combine what they have learned in classes with collaborative and management skills to envision useful, usable end products filled with craft, purpose, mission and maybe even joy."


The challenge will be prefaced this summer by a mini-challenge -- the Duke STEAMy Summer Challenge -- that will invite students to submit short videos that address issues involving disciplines like science, technology, the humanities, social sciences, engineering, arts and mathematics.


Both challenges are extracurricular and opened to all Duke students. More information is available at dukesteamchallenge.org.