Innovation Education Blooms in Georgia with GIPA and National Inventors Hall of Fame Collaboration

The Georgia Intellectual Property AllianceⓇ (GIPA) and National Inventors Hall of FameⓇ (NIHF) have partnered to pilot the first IPknow™ program in Georgia school districts in late 2021/early 2022. The IPknow program combines professional development for educators and access to student programming. This pilot initiative was designed and developed to support the mission of both organizations to educate students and educators in Georgia about the benefits of understanding the importance of incorporating concepts related to intellectual property (IP). While NIHF already has a presence in some parts of Georgia, GIPA seeks to help expand access to the NIHF innovation and IP curricula to more students. 

What is IPknow?

IPknow is the K-12 educational outreach initiative of GIPA which provides access to invention education and intellectual property resources and programs to students and educators across Georgia. These resources include teacher professional development opportunities, high-quality hands-on curriculum and programming for students designed for in-school, afterschool, and summer learning environments, as well as online resources which have been vetted by our IP experts. The goal of the IPknow program is to encourage the use of the teaching and learning strategies in the classroom and other platforms where students will engage with the real-world concepts of IP and invention education. 

The goals of the inaugural IPknow™ pilot program were to:

  • understand the level of awareness on IP and invention education among Georgia educators,

  • understand the hurdles to introducing IP concepts in Georgia classrooms,

  • learn what Georgia educators need to support teaching IP concepts,

  • provide Georgia educators with professional development through a proven curriculum and hands-on learning, and

  • introduce educators to various resources and understand how to best facilitate access to those resources.

The data we have gathered through the partnership with NIHF will allow GIPA to amplify and expand upon existing efforts to introduce invention education and IP education to students from kindergarten through high school across the state of Georgia. 

The Inaugural Cohort

GIPA and NIHF launched the IPknow pilot in October 2021, identifying an inaugural cohort of seven (7) teachers and 180 students from five school districts across the state of Georgia, including Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools, Cherokee County School District, Rome City Schools, and Washington County Schools. Participating teachers received the NIHF Camp Invention Open MicⓇ curriculum and lesson plans along with a classroom set of individually packed student materials (each including their own wireless microphone!), student inventor logs to accompany the curriculum, and access to online interactive media presentations. The Open Mic curriculum lets students amplify their creative voice, take apart and reverse engineer their wireless microphone, and then develop, protect, and promote their own incredible inventions!

During this pilot teachers were provided with professional development virtual workshops. The first was to introduce them to invention education and intellectual property concepts. The second was focused on the curriculum and program their students would experience. They were also asked to complete a pre-experience survey and a post-experience survey.

Here are some of the results:

Pre-pilot Survey

Post-pilot Survey

What’s Next?

Michael J. Oister, National Inventors Hall of Fame CEO, observes that “It is not enough to simply teach students how to code, design and invent; they also must learn how to protect what they create.” In today's knowledge economy, a state needs to develop a more sophisticated workforce that is more attune to how IP is leveraged to help increase innovation and move ideas from Head to Hands™. The IPknow program is just one effort to help the state of Georgia reach that goal.

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