Our Approach to Innovation
At EdTech Hub, we collaborate with governments, innovators, and other education stakeholders to test and support the scaling of EdTech interventions. We work to generate real-world learning quickly, helping partners adapt ideas, reduce risk, and explore solutions that could reach more learners.
One of the main ways we do this is through sandboxes, flexible spaces where interventions, technologies, and approaches can be explored in practice. Sandboxes allow partners to try ideas, learn from evidence, and refine approaches before considering scale.
We guide research design, support entrepreneurs to expand impact, make evidence more usable through storytelling, mobilise communities, help governments adopt evidence-informed approaches, and inform more strategic funding.
Projects often have multiple goals, and we explore different ways to improve learning outcomes and strengthen education systems. Through sandboxes, networks, and evidence-driven insights, we aim to uncover what works and how it might be applied more broadly.
What is a Sandbox?
A sandbox is a real-life location used for experimentation. As you might imagine, a sandbox creates a small, contained space to test a proposed intervention. It allows us to safely learn about and adapt an intervention 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.
For example, we may test a new EdTech intervention within a single school, address any challenges encountered, and then roll out the initiative to a cluster of schools, addressing any issues identified at a larger scale, before extending it to an education district.
Do You Want to Run Your Own Sandbox?
EdTech Hub has created a handbook and tools to guide implementers through the sandbox process. We encourage you to take a look and see how you could use these methods in your own work.
Past Sandboxes
Between June 2020 and March 2021, we completed 5 sandboxes, each responding to school closures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. They were designed to rapidly test promising EdTech interventions, using a mix of funding, support, and access to evidence. Each sandbox was an opportunity to try out new ideas at a small scale and see how they actually work for students, teachers, and other participants.
We break sandboxes up into short sprints, learning and iterating as we go. Each sprint informs iterations and new ideas for the next sprint.
The projects linked below introduce and briefly outline insights and progress from our work. These overviews are a starting point — with key facts and useful resources for further reading. In every case, there’s a great deal of supporting material that we encourage you to explore.
Insights from Our Sandbox Portfolio
