Edge Factor Partners with Community College for Student Design Competition

Television and educational media producer Edge Factor is teaming up with Randolph Community College (Randolph, North Carolina) to launch a student design competition “with a reality show twist” called Reality Redesigned. The project is aimed at empowering students to become makers and challenging parent perceptions of manufacturing careers.

According to Edge Factor, the competition will enable imaginative students to connect with industry and educational mentors and collaboratively design solutions to outrageous scenarios. “It’s a creative mashup of storytelling-meets-inventor, “Chopped”-meets-“Cards against Humanity”-meets “Shark Tank,” the media producer says.

The audition phase of Reality Redesigned officially launched online February 1 at realityredesigned.com for students to begin unlocking unique problems for their teams to solve. Competitors begin by choosing three cards that provide a person, a place and a challenge. Teams keep flipping the deck until they get a combination that will inspire a “problem story” for the team to creatively define through their own interpretation. From there, they will design and present solutions to their problem story by uploading team videos, pictures of drawings, CAD models, planning documents, cost estimates, etc.

This opportunity has been announced to over 15,000 public and charter school students in grades 6-12 in Randolph County. Teams can consist of six middle or high school students and one mentor who can be a teacher, parent or businessperson.

On the “Day of Reckoning” March 8, student projects lock down and public voting will begin. Celebrity judges will evaluate submissions throughout the month of March and the combination of public votes and judges’ rankings will result in the announcement of the top three auditions. The three teams will face off on a reality TV show filmed at the Gene Haas Computer-Integrated Machining Institute at Randolph Community College, where they will be given a real-world challenge, a toolbox of resources and 84 hours to dream, design, build and get ready to present their ideas.