The Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge is a nationwide open call to find innovative, cutting-edge, education technologies that will transform middle school education.

The Winners
Georgia Tech
in partnership with University of Pennsylvania
Lumovia
An interactive, mobile, augmented reality application that prompts students to complete real-world STEM learning “quests” in their everyday environments.
New York University
The 5G Enabled Collaborative Mixed Reality Classroom
Students work together in teams to construct and manipulate virtual models, form hypotheses, and test those hypotheses in real time.
World Science Festival in partnership with Columbia University
Visceral Science: Grasping the Universe through Virtual Reality
Movers and Shakers(NYC)
Geolocation AR Monuments
An interactive and animated AR experience featuring a series of new urban monuments of women and people of color. The content brings stories to life, enabling students to learn history in an immersive way.
Tufts University
5G K-12 Robotics Classroom
A set of AR and VR tools for robotics in K-12 classroom that gives students clear understanding of the complex workflows of a robot.
New York University
in partnership with Columbia University
5G COVET(Cosmos Verizon Education Toolkit)
A set of virtual educational labs, each forming a virtual room that students will visit – moving from room to room – similar to the popular “escape rooms” experience.
New York Hall of Science
Playground Physics
An app that makes physics fun and interactive, in the classroom and beyond. Students document their own bodies in motion, track the paths of their physical activities, and use onscreen data tools to analyze the variables of force, energy, and motion.
Columbia University
Mixed Reality to Improve Social Skills
A mixed reality game that helps students with autism improve their social skills. Students will be able to read emotions and initiate conversations with multiple virtual characters in a room.
Rap Research Lab
Mapper’s Delight
A multi-person mixed reality environment that allows students, through Hip Hop, to conduct sophisticated analyses using data science and visualization.
The New School
Making Projects with Purpose in Immersive Media
Challenge Areas
Student Readiness and Engagement
We can use the unique capabilities of 5G to engage middle school students and educators to improve learning outcomes and address fundamental obstacles to student readiness for high school, college and careers.
Teacher
Training
5G can enable us to reimagine how STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is taught and learned, to reduce the gap in STEM education in underserved middle schools.
Personalized Supports
We can use 5G to improve the learning experience and reduce the resource gap for students with special and/or diverse learning needs in under-resourced middle schools.

About Us
The Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge is a collaborative partnership between the Verizon Foundation, Verizon 5G Labs, and the NYC Media Lab. The Challenge reflects the intersection of social impact, emerging technology and the innovation ecosystem. Together, we are launching a new initiative that brings cutting-edge technologies to underserved middle school classrooms throughout the country.
What is 5G?
5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology. 5G will have a massive impact on how we live, learn, work and play. Autonomous cars, smart communities, the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), immersive education—they will all rely on 5G. 5G will usher in the fourth industrial revolution, paving the way for unprecedented innovations that will reshape the world.

In partnership with
