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This Activity Kit introduces students to a user-centered way of thinking. It puts their innovative and creative skills to the test. Design Thinking is practiced by professionals everyday to solve human problems in the workplace and ensure solutions are meeting users' real needs. It is a way for them to create user-centered outcomes and incorporate user feedback as well as team reflection.

The Activity Kit features two parts. You can choose to run only one part or both. Part 1 and Part 2 can be run consequently or on different days. Click the link under Facilitation Materials to access the guides for Part 1 and Part 2. There are guides for both virtual and in-person workshops. 

All Resources

IDEO Blog

How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to Billion Dollar Business

40 Design Thinking Success Stories

Design thinking – what, how, why, when? | Paweł Żebrowski (18 min) | TEDx talk

English

Portuguese

Activity Duration

Preparation Time

Estimated Cost of Materials

Audience Age

Topic

Languages

Design Thinking is a user-centric framework used to solve problems in a creative and practical way.

Design Thinking Workshop

This activity kit introduces the fundamentals of quantum computing with Protein Puzzle, an interactive game designed to teach students about the power and future potential of quantum computing.Protein Puzzle shows the power of quantum computing through an easy-to-understand analogy while providing students with facts and additional resources to learn about quantum computing.The activity can be completed in about 30 minutes, depending on number of students.

Quantum Computing Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED

Protein Puzzle game

What is quantum computing?

A game to demonstrate the power of quantum computing to students

Introduction to Quantum Computing with Protein Puzzle

IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite includes a geospatial analytics repository to develop apps/services that can help create awareness on climate change. This tool helps to create stories to help younger generations understand the challenges humanity will face. Geodudes' Wind Farm game will allow participants to get a better understanding of how windmill farms generate power. Which in turn will help them better understand the impact of renewable energies.


IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Geodudes Windmill Power

Presentation deck

Windpower One-Pager

Learn more with IBM SkillsBuild!

Help students learn about renewable energy through gamification.

Education for renewable energy – Helping climate change

This activity kit introduces students to IBM Z and enterprise computing. The learning platform allows hands-on access into the operating system while providing a helpful community, digital badges, rewards and leadership boards.  

IBM Z Xplore Learning Platform:

IBM Z Xplore is a learning platform built to help students, educators, and re-skillers develop and refine their IBM Z skills. Within our platform, we have channels for learning, badge opportunities, and a forum for guidance.

Available year-round to anyone who wants to learn more about IBM Z and enterprise computing. Get exposure through three different channels: Fundamentals, Concepts and Advanced to pick up hands-on experience with IBM Z and earn IBM Digital Badges along the way.

- Fundamentals: Experience hands-on learning about data sets and how to use VS Code. Get introduced to coding languages such as JCL, Python, USS, and more.

-  Concepts: Get increased knowledge on security, uptime, and enterprise scalability. Take a deeper look into subsystems, Db2, and RACF.

- Advanced: Elevate your hands-on learning around REXX, COBOL, Linux, and more.

IBM Z Xplore Kit

IBM Z Xplore Learning Platform

IBM Z Global Student Hub Community

IBM Z and LinuxONE Community

IBM Z Student Contest

The IBM Z Xplore Learning Platform (a new learning platform replacing Master the Mainframe) is a fun way to get hands-on experience across a variety of technologies, to develop valuable skills, and to earn digital badges – no prior knowledge required and available year-round!

IBM Z Xplore

Register for IBM Cloud

More information about IBM Cloud

More information on recent internal changes

IBM employees are encouraged to use their internal IBM Cloud accounts, which include all Lite services at no charge. IBM volunteers can also register for a Lite account following the link below. Questions can also be posted on the IBM Volunteers Slack channel.

Both IBM volunteers and non-IBM volunteers who require Cloud access beyond a Lite account are encouraged to request access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud by sending an email to citizenshipcloud@ibm.com with the following subject line “Citizenship Cloud Access.” In the body of the email, please outline what cloud resources you need and which Activity Kit will be used. Students will get appropriate access directly from their teachers. Volunteers who only require a Lite account do not need to ask for access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud. Find details on how to link a Physical TJBot to the Swift Playground below.

This activity introduces students to cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) by helping them build a simple robot that they can bring to life using Watson™ cloud services. In addition to using existing programming recipes, students can unleash their creativity and create new recipes to bring TJBot to life using Watson™ services. Follow instructions below to help students create either a physical TJBot.  The Physical TJBot requires the purchase of an accurately cut cardboard bot and a Raspberry Pi that provides sounds and connectivity to the Watson services that make it possible for the TJBot to respond. There is also a virtual version of this TJBot Activity Kit that does not require the purchase of a cardboard kit or Raspberry Pi. Please see additional information on the Virtual TJBot.

Virtual TJBot

Presentation Deck

Language Kit

Buy your students their TJBot Kits

All Activity Kit Resources

TJBot Blogpost

Data science and machine learning

Artificial Intelligence Today

French

Introduce programming, cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to students by helping them bring their own TJBot Robot to life!

TJBot

Both IBM volunteers and non-IBM volunteers who require Cloud access beyond a Lite account are encouraged to request access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud by sending an email to citizenshipcloud@ibm.com with the following subject line “Citizenship Cloud Access.” In the body of the email, please outline what cloud resources you need and which Activity Kit will be used. Students will get appropriate access directly from their teachers. Volunteers who only require a Lite account do not need to ask for access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud.

This Activity Kit introduces students to cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) by helping them connect to a virtual TJBot robot. This virtual robot can be configured to use any available Watson™ cloud service such as Watson Assistant (chatbot), Speech to Text and Text to Speech. In addition to using existing programming recipes, students can unleash their creativity and create new recipes to bring the Virtual TJBot to life using Watson™ services. The Virtual TJBot uses the iPad to connect to Watson services and emulates the physical TJBot's behavior.

There is also a physical version of this Virtual TJBot Activity Kit where students create a physical robot out of cardboard and a Raspberry Pi. Please see additional information on the physical TJBot.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Artifical Intelligence Today

Italian

Spanish; Castilian

Turkish

Introduce programming, cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to students by helping them bring their own Virtual TJBot Robot to life!

IBM has partnered with Plastic Bank to help the world stop ocean plastic and improve the lives of the people who help collect it. This Activity Kit provides turnkey resources to help you teach your family, friends or community group about plastic pollution, remotely or in person. 


This Activity Kit enables you to teach others about their plastic footprint and how blockchain technology and Design Thinking principles can help solve environmental and social issues. The Activity Kit includes a Plastic Footprint Calculator developed by Plastic Bank that estimates a person’s plastic consumption and recommends actions they can take to reduce their plastic consumption and pollution.


This Activity Kit can be used in two ways:


Personal Activity: Share the Plastic Footprint Calculator with colleagues, friends and family. Access the calculator here.

Community Activity: Give a presentation about ocean plastic, IBM Blockchain, and introduce the Plastic Footprint Calculator to students or another community group. This presentation includes a Design Thinking activity to reinforce learning and can be run remotely, too!

Explore the Plastic Calulator & share with friends, family and colleagues

Community Activity: PowerPoint Presentation

For students

For teachers

IBM Blockchain videos

Teach your colleagues, family, friends or students about their individual plastic footprint and help them learn how Design Thinking and blockchain technology can be applied to help solve social problems.

Reduce Your Plastic Footprint!

Do you ever think about how the digital life you lead can affect your real life? This Activity Kit is designed to bring awareness to the dangers children face every day in the digital world and what they can do to better protect themselves. The Activity Kit consists of three main sections built to: 

1. help students become aware of cybercrime

2. educate them about personal data and digital footprints

3. teach them how to create strong passwords while using secure mobile devices through a game

Internet of Me Activity Kit Facilitator Materials

DJ's Cyber Day game

Learn more with IBM SkillsBuild

Securing the Internet of Things

Help students learn how to protect their personal data and identity online through an interactive lesson and a hands-on password game with this CyberDay4Girls Activity Kit.

Internet of Me - Protecting Your Online Identity

Activity Kits allow volunteers and teachers to bring important STEM learning to a classroom. This Activity Kit introduces students to core cybersecurity concepts and reinforces their learning through a Design Thinking and classroom debate exercise. You'll help students understand how to protect their data, how to take control of what they share online and learn more about careers in cybersecurity.

IBM Design Thinking Field Guide

Cybersecurity Activity Kit

Both IBM volunteers and non-IBM volunteers who require Cloud access beyond a Lite account are encouraged to request access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud by sending an email to citizenshipcloud@ibm.com with the following subject line “Citizenship Cloud Access.” In the body of the email, please outline what cloud resources you need and which Activity Kit will be used. Students will get appropriate access directly from their teachers. Volunteers who only require a Lite account do not need to ask for access to the IBM Citizenship Cloud.

In this Activity Kit, you will help students train simple machine-learning models and use them to play games and complete interactive projects. This Activity Kit introduces students to the principles and implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. In this activity, you and your students will input data and the machine creates links that help it answer questions that are not in the data. You can pick from over two dozen activities to fit your time and audience age requirements.

Machine Learning for Kids Help Guide

Machine Learning for Kids Help Site

Machine Learning for Dummies

Choose from a variety of hands-on activities that introduce simple machine learning models to students through games and interactive projects.

Machine Learning for Kids

The use of cryptography began thousands of years ago as a way to protect secrets using codes and ciphers. However, it wasn’t until the 20th century that mechanical systems such as the Enigma rotor machine made encryption an efficient and effective way to protect information. Today, encryption methods used to make ciphers has become more complex and even harder to break. This Activity Kit gives students an introduction into cryptography and includes hands-on exercises designed to teach students how to encrypt and decrypt messages using ciphers.

Intro to Cryptography Activity Kit Facilitator Materials

Learn more on Open PTECH

Internet of Me

Learn about cryptography, ciphers, plaintext, ciphertext, and how you can teach young minds about the wonderful world of encryption in this CyberDay4Girls Activity Kit.

Introduction to Cryptography

Blockchain offers all parties involved in a business network a secure and synchronized transaction from beginning to end. This is done through digital ledgers, a chronicle version of the list of events designed to be unhackable. The list of the events are blocks; the blocks are distributed across multiple computers. In order to make a change to the list, or blocks, each party has to agree. This Activity Kit is designed to teach students about blockchain through an interactive game called Are the fish safe to eat? They will learn every step of the blockchain process by figuring out who touched the fish starting from the fisherman, all the way through the importers, exporters, and distributors. 

Intro to Blockchain Activity Kit Facilitator Materials

Intro to Cryptography Activity Kit

Internet of Me Activity Kit

Help students learn about blockchain technology through interactive puzzles through this CyberDay4Girls Activity Kit.

Introduction to Blockchain

From mobile phones to smart thermostats, internet connected devices and apps are a part of our children’s everyday lives. In this Activity Kit, students will learn about the Internet of Things (IoT) and the importance of following cybersecurity best practices when connecting to their devices. We have designed this workshop particularly for girls in response to the significant gender gap in the cybersecurity profession. Though this CyberDay4Girls Activity Kit was designed to be used in a classroom, it can also be adapted to be used with your children at home.

Securing the Internet of Things Activity Kit Facilitator Materials

Learn more with Open PTECH

Help students understand the risks associated with the use of internet connected devices and apps. This is a CyberDay4Girls Activity Kit.

In this Activity Kit, volunteers present cloud concepts and terminology to students and use interactive games and activities to reinforce their learning. Students will learn real-life examples of how the cloud is used today. They will partake in a virtual scavenger hunt that uses cloud-based maps, compete against their classmates using an online game and put their creativity and team working skills to the test by participating in a "Hackathon" to develop a new cloud-based mobile app.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

St. Anthony Middle School students create App

IBM Cloud docs

Use this Activity Kit to introduce students to basic cloud concepts using interactive games and activities.

Get Your Head in the Cloud

In this Activity Kit, children will have the chance to learn about optical illusions by creating one: the thaumatrope. From being a popular toy in the Victorian era, to being the antecedent of 20th century animation films, the thaumatrope is now a fun toy you can help children create themselves.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Watch What is Persistence of Vision?

Optical Illusions for Kids

Open P-TECH

Estimate Cost of Materials

Help children recreate a popular toy from the 19th century to learn about optical illusions.

Exploring Optical Illusions with Thaumatropes

 In this Activity Kit, children will get familiar with the properties of acids and bases by exploring what happens when an acidic element reacts with a basic element. Through the two experiments presented below, kids will learn that the product of this reaction is carbon dioxide, released in the form of gas.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here. 

All Activity Resources

Adventures in Chemistry

Elementary & Middle School Chemistry Resources

Teach children about the basics of chemical reactions between acids and bases in this fun activity you can do at home!

Experimenting with Acids and Bases

This Activity Kit introduces students to Watson Assistant, a cognitive chatbot that understands questions by learning. The Activity Kit enables anyone to configure a bot that can understand words, speak and respond to simple tones associated with emotions. Students will learn how Watson Assistant works using a hands-on approach. The volunteer instructor will present different chatbot case studies and will guide students through co-creating a chatbot for an imaginary business together as a class. This Activity Kit will help students become familiar with the technology increasingly used in call centers, automobiles, and such services as smart speakers (e.g. Alexa). This class is led by the teacher to avoid having students acquire IBM Cloud credentials.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Watson Assistant

Learn more about Chatbots

"Build Your Own Chatbot" Badge

Create Your Own Chatbot!

In this engaging Activity Kit, volunteers will help students learn about blockchain through an interactive coffee trading game. This game simulates a blockchain and allows students to run a virtual coffee harvesting or brewing business and trade their coffee products a using a browser on any platform. Through this fun and competitive game, students will gain a basic understanding of what blockchain is, how it works, and how blockchain will change the way we exchange goods and services. 

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Blockchain for dummies

Transparency from farm to cup

Students become coffee growers and traders with this interactive game that teaches participants about blockchain networks.

Trading Coffee with Blockchain

Activity Duration: 1 hour<br/>Audience Age: 11+<br/>Topics: Education, Diversity, Anti-racism

Life presents a unique journey for everyone, with many twists and turns along the way. No two paths are the same. The people, places, and societal systems around us can shape who we are and the opportunities we are given.
Together, through learning, taking action, and sharing our knowledge with others, we can break down barriers created by societal systems and work toward a more equitable world for everyone. Explore this interactive anti-racism Activity Kit and share with others to create a more equitable future for everyone!

Break the System: Anti-racism Activity Kit

We're grateful for the generous contributions of the following people, and many others not listed here, who helped bring this important learning to life. Thank you!

Together, through learning, taking action and sharing our knowledge with others, we can break down barriers created by societal systems and work toward a more equitable world for everyone.

This Activity Kit is designed to be a first step in your learning journey about racial equity. While much of the content in this Activity Kit is North American focused, we address diverse geographical regions and expect this content to continuously evolve to encompass broader inclusion goals. As you explore the resources in this Activity Kit, you will unlock digital stickers that you can share with others to invite them to start their own racial equity learning journey as you learn how six of the many systems in society can either support or oppress people and communities. Explore the interactive System Cards below to learn how together we can work toward a more inclusive and equitable future for everyone.

IBMers, be sure to log your volunteer time in the IBM Volunteering & Giving Portal, so you can qualify for IBM Volunteer Grants and double your impact. Record your hours here.

Life presents a unique journey for everyone, with many twists and turns along the way. No two paths are the same. The people, places, and societal systems around us can shape who we are and the opportunities we are given.

Explore this interactive anti-racism Activity Kit and share with others to create a more equitable future for everyone.

Legal Disclaimer: Some of the recommended materials in this roadmap may not be IBM materials. IBM makes no representations about any third party materials or other website which you may access through this one.

Help us bring an end to systemic racism by learning and sharing this resource with others.

Explore the interactive System cards below to learn more about how together we can create a more equitable future for everyone.

Anti-Racism Activity Kit Presentation - Student Guide.pdf

Anti-Racism Activity Kit Presentation - Teacher Guide.pdf

Continue learning about this activity kit by exploring the following educational resources

Explore this cybersecurity site to learn more about how to keep yourself and the people you care about safe online.

Resources for teachers

Resources for parents

Digital experience for students

Additional resources

Additional resources for teachers

Let's Talk Safe Tech Activity Kit

Explore these resources to help you share cybersecurity learning with others.

Additional Resources

Malware

Phishing

Ransomware

Spear phishing

Spyware

Learn more about what they do

Cybersecurity at IBM

Have you been up to date on how to protect yourself and your devices? Test your cybersecurity know-how in this quiz.

What's your cybersecurity style?

A team of designers and developers built this site, and even we have been hacked!

Stories

How safe have you been online?

looping background video clip of "The Talk"

Personality Details

How many browser tabs do you have open right now?

From a digital catalogue, like on iTunes, or your local library.

On a user-generated video platform like YouTube.

On a streaming service like Netflix, Hulu or Crave.

A friend is coming over to watch a movie. Where are you most likely to watch it?

What is the first name of the first person you kissed?

What is the name of the hospital you were born in?

What was the name of your primary school?

Which security question do you usually pick?

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