Alanna Shaikh:  How I’m preparing to get Alzheimer’s

There’s about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they’re expecting that to double to 70 million. That’s a lot of people.

Kenneth Shinozuka:  My simple invention, designed to keep my grandfather safe

… I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don’t I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver’s smartphone.

What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in, not fighting to stay out? And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what’s now called non-cognitive skills — the skills of motivation, resilience — and that these are as important as the cognitive skills — formal academic skills — we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School. And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. You work by learning, and you learn by working.