Aspiring Innovators: making, competition and a fair chance to participate

Research date: September 19, 2026. Prepared by Education Angel Group with AI-assisted research and drafting. EAG is developing Aspiring Innovators and has a direct interest in the proposal. This is a focused research report, not an independent evaluation. No Aspiring Innovators participants were interviewed or observed for this report, and no platform outcomes have been measured.

1. Proposition and audience

Aspiring Innovators proposes bounded Challenges through which schools, teams, clubs and other approved groups can make something, explain their work and take part in a disclosed review or competition. It would help a group judge whether an activity is suitable before committing: what to make, who can participate, what materials and time are needed, what evidence to submit, who reviews it and what any recognition or award means. An optional continuation into Runstr would serve an identified purpose after that activity, without creating another account or reward economy.

The central research conclusion is conditional. A well-supported making activity is worth investigating. Its value does not depend on demonstrating that competition improves every learner, and existing research does not establish that it does. The strongest initial proposition is a clear, useful group activity with an honest result. Judging, paid community support and resource allocation require separate explanations and evidence.

The immediate audiences are students considering a first attempt; adults deciding whether to supervise it; group stewards responsible for participation; and Challenge editors who must provide instructions, review capacity and corrections. A partner may help fund or organize an approved Challenge, but that does not grant access to student work or private information. School and group context matters: a student's interest in an activity does not authorize that student to represent an institution.

EAG's current definition rules out personal-cash framing, a student-popularity contest, an ungoverned Challenge marketplace and a duplicate Runstr points or supporter system. Runstr owns account-required identity and the subscription source events behind any approved community-support presentation. The exact voting rules and award effect remain unresolved. These are product boundaries from EAG's canonical definition, A0, not findings from external research.

2. Questions that determine whether the proposal is useful

The report asks when bounded Challenges could support making and learning, and when eligibility, competition or prizes might exclude participants. Five questions give that inquiry practical shape.

Question | Evidence needed | What would not answer it
Can a group understand and start the activity? | Comprehension, materials access and reasons for declining | Page visits or registrations alone
Does the activity produce useful making or learning? | Work, revision, explanation and an appropriate comparison | A polished final photograph
What does competition add? | Differences in effort, quality, pressure and return interest | Assuming that winners prove benefit for everyone
Can adults administer it fairly? | Preparation time, consistent judging and workable corrections | An attractive public result page
Does the Runstr connection preserve trust? | Clear separation of participation, merit, support and resource delivery | Treating subscriptions as educational achievement

A Challenge may succeed as an enjoyable group activity without improving standardized attainment. It may also produce strong artifacts while excluding people who lack adult help. These are different outcomes. The report therefore separates feasibility, participant experience, learning, fairness and institutional benefit instead of treating completion as a universal success measure.

The unresolved local questions are substantial. There is no verified inventory here of interested Arkansas groups, available materials, preferred activities, adult capacity or acceptable award rules. A national competition's existence does not establish demand for another one. The first inquiry should be about a specific group's task and alternatives, not a projection of national platform growth.

3. Need and context: access to a worthwhile attempt

The practical need is narrower than a claim that schools lack innovation. A group may want a manageable activity but face several decisions at once: selecting something appropriate, assembling materials, assigning roles, documenting work and finding an audience that can respond usefully. Aspiring Innovators could organize those decisions. Whether groups actually need that help, and whether they prefer it to a familiar worksheet or teacher-led project, remains a local research question.

An activity's real cost includes more than an entry fee. Consider a hypothetical club that can meet only during lunch. A free Challenge requiring after-school transport, a long video upload or a parent's specialist tools may be inaccessible to that club. This is an illustrative design scenario, not an observed participant account. It shows why “free to enter” cannot substitute for a description of time, materials, supervision and proof requirements.

The relevant unit is often the group, yet access is experienced individually. One student may lack permission to appear in photographs; another may need an adapted way to manipulate materials or explain a design. A group can submit one impressive artifact while those students do little meaningful work. The research question is therefore whether each participant can make a recognizable contribution, not merely whether the team can produce an eligible submission.

School, team, club and community contexts also differ. A teacher may organize activity within an existing class. A volunteer may have limited time and no authority to approve school participation. An unaffiliated visitor can discover a school or suggest a group without making an official institutional claim. The proposed service needs to distinguish those situations before asking for proof, publishing affiliation or explaining any school-directed award.

The available project-learning studies described below concern organized instruction and support. Their findings cannot establish the prevalence of unmet demand for a lightweight Challenge service. No current Arkansas participation or digital-access estimate is asserted here. The evidence supports investigating conditions for a useful attempt, while leaving the size and distribution of demand open.

4. Alternatives and the narrower gap Aspiring Innovators must earn

Existing services already make group projects and competitions possible. eCYBERMISSION's current overview describes a free virtual STEM competition for grades 6-9, with two to four students, an adult advisor and a community problem. Its structure supplies a concrete comparator for guided team participation. These are first-party capability descriptions, not independent evidence of educational benefit. eCYBERMISSION overview, S4 (https://www.ecybermission.com/Overview)

Its judging page describes published rubric categories, up to three reviews and later access to scores and comments. That demonstrates an existing approach to separating submitted work from its assessment. This report did not inspect the linked rubric files and does not rate their validity or recommend importing their scoring rules. eCYBERMISSION judging, S5 (https://www.ecybermission.com/VirtualJudging)

Science Buddies describes an annual K-12 engineering Challenge using simple materials, with free participation, and links to earlier activity instructions and lesson plans. Those materials are an alternative source of activities even when an adult does not want to enter the current competition. Availability is not permission for EAG to reproduce or rebrand them; the site's use terms still apply. Science Buddies, S6 (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/engineering-challenge)

A local teacher-led project, club workshop or private showcase is another serious comparator. It may need no new platform, subscription connection or public ranking. That option can be less scalable for an operator while being simpler for the actual group. A decision to use an existing activity and retain local review would count as a reasonable outcome of this research.

Existing paths meet different group needs
Qualitative alternatives; capability descriptions do not establish effectiveness or permission to reuse content.
These equivalents accompany the reader figures. Source IDs refer to the report references. A0 identifies EAG's product definition reviewed for the original report, not an external study or proof of availability. Other source IDs resolve to this report's reference and access record.

Figure 1. Existing paths meet different group needs

Qualitative alternatives; capability descriptions do not establish effectiveness or permission to reuse content.

eCYBERMISSION: Team competition. Free virtual STEM format with an adult advisor; rubric-linked judging. First-party capability, not outcome proof. S4-S5.

Science Buddies: Activity and annual Challenge. Simple-material engineering activities and past instructions. Rights and fit still need checking. S6.

Local group activity: Proposed comparator. An adult uses a suitable activity and private feedback. No new platform is inherently required. EAG proposal.

Sources: S4, S5, S6, A0.
S4: https://www.ecybermission.com/Overview
S5: https://www.ecybermission.com/VirtualJudging
S6: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/engineering-challenge
A0. EAG product definition: /projects/aspiring-innovators

Figure 1. A qualitative comparison of first-party alternatives and a proposed local option. Capabilities do not establish effectiveness, endorsement, material availability or permission to reuse content. Text and data alternative (#figure-text-and-data-alternatives).

Aspiring Innovators' possible gap is not the invention of projects or contests. It is the combination of a comprehensible first activity, an appropriate school or group context, proportionate proof and a clearly separated optional Runstr continuation. That combination should earn its place by reducing confusion or administrative work. If an existing activity plus a local feedback routine serves the group better, adding a new platform would not be justified by brand integration alone.

5. Evidence and counterevidence

Project work can succeed under specific instructional conditions

Saavedra and colleagues' 2021 Knowledge in Action report evaluates a supported project-based approach to AP U.S. Government and AP Environmental Science in five predominantly urban U.S. districts. The first-year randomized comparison, in 2016-17, favored the intervention on AP outcomes. It combined curriculum and teacher support; school attrition and differences between adjusted and unadjusted results weaken certainty. The 2017-18 follow-up lacked a pure untreated control and was less conclusive. The George Lucas Educational Foundation funded the work. USC report, S1 (https://cesr.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Knowledge%20in%20Action%20Efficacy%20Study_18feb2021_final.pdf)

This is evidence about an instructional package, not a contest portal. EAG cannot remove the curriculum, trained adult support and duration, keep the word “project,” and inherit the result. For Aspiring Innovators, the useful implication is a hypothesis: instructions and adult preparation may matter as much as the attraction of a public Challenge.

Appealing project experiences need not improve the selected outcomes

The 2016 EEF evaluation of Learning through REAL Projects studied Year 7 provision in England during 2014-16. It found no clear overall improvement in literacy or engagement. School feedback described worthwhile experiences, but attrition and control-group crossover limited causal confidence. A negative literacy result for pupils eligible for free school meals was uncertain and should not be treated as a settled subgroup effect. Delivery required organizational support. Menzies and colleagues, S2 (https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/documents/projects/EEF_Project_Report_Project_Based_Learning.pdf?v=1746472944)

The positive and null studies do not cancel each other into a universal verdict. They concern different ages, subjects, implementation packages and outcomes. Their disagreement makes a narrow evaluation more useful: choose what a specific Challenge is intended to accomplish and measure that directly. Satisfaction and attainment should not silently replace each other when one result is less favorable.

Competition has more than one psychological route

Murayama and Elliot's 2012 synthesis found no noteworthy overall competition-performance relationship. Their model distinguishes goals directed toward doing better from goals directed toward avoiding doing worse, with opposing associations. Their additional studies and mixed evidence base do not establish effects for school-based online Challenges. The authors also discuss limitations in mediation and measurement. Original article, S3 (https://motivationsciencelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Murayama_Elliot_2012_The-competition%E2%80%93performance-relation.pdf)

Johnson, Johnson and Roseth's accompanying critique challenges definitions of competition, comparison conditions and elements omitted from that model. It is a scholarly disagreement, not a retraction. Commentary, S8 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23088571/) The relevant EAG inference is modest: “competitive” is not a sufficiently precise description of an intervention. A private attempt, a team contest and a paid-support tally create different situations and need different evaluation.

Cooperation is a credible alternative, not a consolation format

Roseth, Johnson and Johnson's 2008 meta-analysis reports that cooperative goal structures were associated with stronger achievement and peer relationships than competitive or individualistic structures among early adolescents. Only the author abstract was accessible in this review, so the report retains that broad conclusion without effect sizes or a detailed study-quality claim. Author abstract indexed by ERIC, S7 (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787692)

For EAG, this supports considering shared work and useful feedback as a comparator. It does not prove that naming a collection of students a team creates cooperation. An evaluation still needs to ask who does the work, who receives help and whether the structure permits weaker or less confident participants to contribute.

Evidence supports bounded conclusions
Studies differ in populations, interventions and outcomes; no quantitative synthesis or platform effect is shown. Cooperation appraisal is abstract-only.
Figure 2. Evidence supports bounded conclusions

Studies differ in populations, interventions and outcomes; no quantitative synthesis or platform effect is shown. Cooperation appraisal is abstract-only.

Supported AP instruction: Favorable first-year findings. USC 2021 report; bundled curriculum and teacher support. Attrition and follow-up limits. S1.

Year 7 project learning: No clear main benefit. EEF 2016 evaluation; low-security findings and implementation demands. S2.

Competition and cooperation: Context matters. Competition synthesis and critique; cooperation evidence retained at abstract level. No platform effect established. S3, S7-S8.

Sources: S1, S2, S3, S7, S8.
S1: https://cesr.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Knowledge%20in%20Action%20Efficacy%20Study_18feb2021_final.pdf
S2: https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/documents/projects/EEF_Project_Report_Project_Based_Learning.pdf?v=1746472944
S3: https://motivationsciencelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Murayama_Elliot_2012_The-competition%E2%80%93performance-relation.pdf
S7: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787692
S8: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23088571/

Figure 2. Qualitative evidence map. The studies differ in populations, interventions and outcomes; no pooled product effect is calculated. The cooperation source was appraised at abstract level only. Text and data alternative (#figure-text-and-data-alternatives).

Taken together, the evidence permits a trial of a carefully supported Challenge. It does not support claims that Aspiring Innovators raises attainment, produces innovators, improves wellbeing or increases school resources. No retrieved study evaluates its subscription-voting arrangement or establishes a fair weighting rule.

6. Proposed mechanism: three paths that must remain distinguishable

The first hypothesis is about making. A group understands a concrete task, has the resources and permission to attempt it, produces work, receives an intelligible response and decides whether to revise or try something else. Each link can fail. Clear instructions do not supply materials. Submission does not prove participation by every member. Feedback is useful only if participants understand it and have an opportunity to respond.

The second path is judgment. Approved rules define eligibility, criteria, reviewers and the result. The result could recognize a specific achievement, but cannot retrospectively make unclear rules fair. Reviewers need enough evidence to assess the stated criterion without demanding unnecessary exposure. A drawing may be adequate to explain a proposed mechanism; it would not prove that a working prototype performs as claimed. The proof format must match the claim being judged.

The third path is community support. EAG's contract assigns subscription source events to Runstr. Aspiring Innovators may present approved support information, but it cannot create votes from visits, submissions or an apparent checkout success. The report does not select eligible events, repeated-subscription treatment, caps, weights, cutoff rules, refunds, disputes or award effects. Those remain explicit decisions before live counting. EAG definition, A0

Making judging and support remain separate
EAG conceptual model, not a tested causal chain. No vote formula, conversion or award entitlement is established.
Figure 3. Making judging and support remain separate

EAG conceptual model, not a tested causal chain. No vote formula, conversion or award entitlement is established.

Making hypothesis. Understand task → Attempt with group → Submit permitted proof → Use feedback. Unknown: meaningful contribution, usefulness and burden.

Judged achievement. Approved eligibility and criteria → Review work → Explain result and corrections. Proof is not automatically judged achievement.

Community support. Approved Runstr source event → Auditable support presentation → Approved school or group resource process. Rules and award effect unresolved; support is not student merit or delivered resources.

Sources: A0.
A0. EAG product definition: /projects/aspiring-innovators

Figure 3. EAG conceptual mechanism, not a tested causal chain. Submitted proof, judged achievement and community support have different meanings. No conversion rate, vote formula or award entitlement is established. Text and data alternative (#figure-text-and-data-alternatives).

The separation matters even if the eventual experience appears simple. A group can produce excellent work without paying supporters. Another can attract substantial support without receiving a high review assessment. An honest interface must permit both states. Resource benefit, if approved, remains tied to the school or approved group and requires an actual accepted delivery; neither a support tally nor a result label establishes that benefit.

Optional continuation should also remain optional in practice. Participants need to understand the destination, purpose and data boundary. An inability to use Runstr should not turn an otherwise valid activity into a failed attempt. Conversely, recognition within Aspiring Innovators cannot promise admission to another program, automatic reward eligibility or permission to transfer private proof.

7. Design concepts for a bounded first Challenge

The following concepts are research proposals, not approved activities or product implementations. Their purpose is to make a small comparison possible without assuming that a full marketplace or national competition is necessary.

A group activity with private feedback. One responsible adult introduces a bounded making task. The participant-facing description states the goal, materials, time expectation, safety conditions and acceptable proof. Participants receive specific feedback against disclosed criteria. There is no public student rank. This concept most directly tests whether the activity and explanation are useful before adding competitive stakes.

A judged group Challenge. The same basic activity adds a disclosed review and recognition process. Groups know in advance what is assessed, how ties and corrections work and what is available to non-winners. If this format is studied, the comparison should hold the activity and support as constant as practical. Otherwise differences could reflect a better task or more adult attention rather than competition.

A group Challenge with separately disclosed community support. Making and judging remain intact, while an approved Runstr connection explains community support in a distinct place. This concept is conditional on unresolved rules. It should not be used as the first test of educational value because changing the support relationship adds another explanation for participation, pressure and persistence.

For all three, a complete description is more valuable than a catalog of empty categories. The activity should show an example of acceptable work without implying that students must imitate its appearance. A participant should be able to identify who can see proof, what happens after submission and how to request a correction. An unavailable award or closed period needs plain wording rather than a simulated live state.

A first activity could involve explaining and improving a familiar object or process using accessible materials, but this report does not choose the activity or its age range. Choice requires a real group, safety review and an adult able to judge its fit. The research favors testing a task participants can recognize and discuss over building a broad discovery system before one activity works.

Proposed formats answer different questions
EAG proposed comparisons for later approval. Added features change both the research question and administrative burden.
Figure 4. Proposed formats answer different questions

EAG proposed comparisons for later approval. Added features change both the research question and administrative burden.

Private group feedback: Is the activity worthwhile? Compare understanding, contribution, revision and adult effort. Proposed format, not a measured intervention.

Judged group Challenge: What does competition add? Hold task and support comparable; examine non-winners, pressure and review consistency.

Separately disclosed support: Can support preserve trust? Requires approved rules first. Test distinction between merit, support and resource delivery.

Sources: A0, S3, S7.
A0. EAG product definition: /projects/aspiring-innovators
S3: https://motivationsciencelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Murayama_Elliot_2012_The-competition%E2%80%93performance-relation.pdf
S7: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787692

Figure 4. EAG comparison of proposed formats. These are hypotheses for later approval, not measured interventions. Adding competitive or support features changes the questions and burdens that need evaluation. Text and data alternative (#figure-text-and-data-alternatives).

8. Risks, equity and adult burden

The most immediate equity risk is mistaking equal rules for equal opportunity. A materials list can be identical while groups differ in tools, supervision, space and time. A high-quality video can reveal production support more than understanding. Proposed safeguards include accepting proportionate evidence, asking groups about actual constraints before selecting a task and examining who could not start. These are design responses to plausible failure modes; their effectiveness has not been measured here.

Judgment creates another burden. Adults need to distinguish student contribution from coaching, interpret incomplete proof and respond when criteria were misunderstood. A rule against assistance is not useful if the Challenge requires safe adult supervision. The permitted boundary should be explicit: which tasks adults may help with, what students should explain themselves and what information reviewers need. Accusing participants on the basis of an automated authorship score would not resolve that problem.

Public visibility can create pressure or expose information that is unnecessary for the activity. A project photograph might include a face, name, address, uniform or location clue. Group permission, school authorization and permission to publish an individual's work are different questions. A private submission should not become public automatically because the group receives recognition.

The FTC's current COPPA guidance limits school-based consent to the educational context and distinguishes additional commercial uses. That makes it inappropriate to assume that a teacher's approval automatically authorizes a supporter-connected service to use children's information for other purposes. This report offers no finding of legal compliance; the actual data use, ages and institutional arrangements need qualified review. FTC guidance, S9 (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions)

Community support presents a distinct fairness problem. Access to adults who can subscribe may vary independently of the quality of a group's work. If support changes awards, that relationship needs to be visible before participation and evaluated as such. It must not be described as a neutral measure of student merit. Unresolved economic rules cannot be repaired merely by placing a disclaimer next to a leaderboard.

Finally, organizers bear the cost of scheduling, explaining, reviewing, moderating and correcting. A platform that saves discovery time but adds extensive proof handling may increase total work. The relevant estimate is total adult effort per group, including interruptions and disputes, not only the minutes needed to create an account. A smaller Challenge that can be administered honestly is preferable to one whose promised feedback cannot be delivered.

9. Evaluation and criteria for changing direction

The next useful research step is a feasibility study of one approved activity with an identified group context. It should first establish whether students and adults can explain the task, eligibility, proof, audience and result without being coached through the page. A participant's informed decision not to join is valid evidence, not a conversion defect to eliminate.

Evaluation should preserve distinct denominators. Groups invited, groups that inspected the activity, groups that started, participants who contributed and groups that submitted are not interchangeable. Record reasons for non-starting and withdrawal where participants voluntarily provide them. Do not count absence of a complaint as evidence of comfort or fairness.

Outcome | Proposed evidence | Reason to revise or stop
Understanding | Participants explain task and rules in their own words | Repeated misunderstanding of eligibility, visibility or awards
Meaningful contribution | Brief account of each member's work and a relevant artifact | Submission depends on a single adult or excludes members
Learning or revision | Explanation of a choice and response to feedback | Polished output without understanding of the claimed learning
Voluntariness | Private feedback and willingness to decline or return | Pressure to pay, recruit supporters or publish work
Administration | Total preparation, review and correction time | Feedback cannot be delivered within the stated commitment
Fairness | Disagreement review, barriers and non-winner experience | Rules favor irrelevant resources or cannot be applied consistently
Support transparency | Clear distinction among proof, judgment and support | Participants infer that payment determines merit or access

If feasibility is acceptable, a later comparative study could examine private-feedback and judged formats of the same activity. Allocation at group level may reduce mixing between formats, but the design would need enough groups, an appropriate analysis and a stated plan for missing data. No sample size or success threshold is invented here. The acceptable burden and minimum useful difference should be agreed with participating adults before interpreting results.

A small feasibility study cannot establish durable educational effects. Any future claim about learning should use a measure tied to the task and, where relevant, a later transfer or retention question. A future claim about school resources requires separately verified costs, allocation, institutional acceptance and delivery. Neither claim follows from a participation count.

The proposal should change direction if a noncompetitive activity provides equal or better value with less pressure, if an existing service meets the need more simply, or if adults cannot sustain the review process. It should pause public recognition when permission, eligibility or corrections are unreliable. It should keep support counting unavailable until the source events and rules can be explained and audited. These are substantive decision criteria, not assumptions that the product must proceed.

10. Methods, limitations, references and corrections

This focused review was conducted on September 19, 2026. It prioritized original evaluations, original research syntheses, institutional guidance and first-party descriptions of alternatives. Searches addressed project-based learning trials, competition and cooperation, Challenge administration, access and school consent. It was not a systematic review: no exhaustive database search, duplicate screening or statistical synthesis was performed.

Full report text was retrieved for the USC and EEF evaluations and the Murayama-Elliot article. First-party alternative pages and FTC guidance were inspected. The cooperation finding was limited to the author abstract indexed by ERIC because full-text access failed. A national digital-access table could not be retrieved reliably and supplied no numbers to this report. No secondary summary was substituted for a numerical finding.

The competition PDF also contains a commentary and reply after the principal article. Those documents were not mistaken for additional findings of the original authors. Targeted correction searches identified the scholarly debate, not a verified retraction. A similarly named correction concerned a different Elliot paper and was excluded. These bounded checks do not establish that every source is free of later correction. Publication dates were taken from documents, not search-engine crawl dates.

The findings remain limited by transfer. An AP curriculum, a Year 7 instructional program and a laboratory competition differ from a voluntary online group Challenge. Existing services' descriptions establish capabilities, not comparative effectiveness. The review collected no Aspiring Innovators outcomes, local demand estimate, interviews, willingness-to-pay evidence or test of subscription voting. EAG's interpretations and proposed mechanisms should be revised when direct evidence becomes available.

References below identify the retained sources and the parts used. Links were checked or attempted on the research date. Future editions should correct material errors in the affected claim and explain whether the correction changes the recommendation.

- A0. Education Angel Group, Aspiring Innovators product definition, reviewed September 19, 2026 for this report. Defines intended scope, not implementation or effectiveness.
- S1. Saavedra, A. R., Liu, Y., Haderlein, S. K., Rapaport, A., Garland, M., Hoepfner, D., Morgan, K. L., and Hu, A. (2021). Knowledge in Action Efficacy Study Over Two Years (https://cesr.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Knowledge%20in%20Action%20Efficacy%20Study_18feb2021_final.pdf). USC Dornsife. Cover dated February 22; executive summary pp. 5-6 and study-wide limitations p. 33.
- S2. Menzies, V., Hewitt, C., Kokotsaki, D., Collyer, C., and Wiggins, A. (2016). Project Based Learning: evaluation report and executive summary (https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/documents/projects/EEF_Project_Report_Project_Based_Learning.pdf?v=1746472944). EEF, November; pp. 4-7, impact and process evaluations.
- S3. Murayama, K., and Elliot, A. J. (2012). The competition-performance relation (https://motivationsciencelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Murayama_Elliot_2012_The-competition%E2%80%93performance-relation.pdf). Psychological Bulletin, 138, 1035-1070. DOI: 10.1037/a0028324. Abstract, mediation limitations pp. 1044-1045 and general discussion.
- S4. eCYBERMISSION. Overview (https://www.ecybermission.com/Overview). Current first-party team and activity description; page undated.
- S5. eCYBERMISSION. Judging (https://www.ecybermission.com/VirtualJudging). Virtual judging process; linked rubric documents were not appraised.
- S6. Science Buddies. Engineering Challenge (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/engineering-challenge). About, past Challenges and use notice; page includes the 2026 activity.
- S7. Roseth, C. J., Johnson, D. W., and Johnson, R. T. (2008). Promoting early adolescents' achievement and peer relationships (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787692). Psychological Bulletin, 134, 223-246. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.223. Author abstract only.
- S8. Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., and Roseth, C. J. (2012). Competition and performance: more facts, more understanding? (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23088571/) Psychological Bulletin, 138, 1071-1078. DOI: 10.1037/a0029454. Commentary abstract and appended commentary in the S3 PDF.
- S9. Federal Trade Commission. Complying with COPPA: frequently asked questions (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions). Section N, COPPA and schools; current guidance checked September 19, 2026.

Figure text and data alternatives

Complete semantic alternatives accompany each figure in this reader and its text download. Source IDs refer to the references in this report. A0 identifies EAG's product definition reviewed for the original report, not an external study or proof of availability. Other source IDs resolve to this report's reference and access record.

Corrections and entity context

Readers identifying an error can contact EAG (/contact) with the section, disputed statement and supporting source. Aspiring Innovators (/projects/aspiring-innovators) provides the public entity context, not an external citation for EAG's product claims.