Sandboxes: what we've learned

The Covid-19 pandemic is good for one thing: keeping people apart. The social consequences are far-reaching, particularly in education.

Although EdTech Hub was not created to help educators deal with the pandemic, we’ve had to rapidly pivot our efforts to do exactly that.

We’ve found that conducting fast-paced, iterative experiments in the real world has been a valuable way of learning. We call these projects sandboxes. Between June 2020 and March 2021, we completed 5 sandboxes, each responding to school closures caused by Covid-19. They were designed to rapidly test promising EdTech interventions, using a mix of funding, support and access to evidence. Each was an opportunity to try out new ideas at small scale, and see how they actually work for real students, teachers and other participants.

We break sandboxes up into short sprints, learning and iterating as we go. Each sprint informs changes and new ideas for the next.

The pages linked below introduce and briefly outline the progress we’ve made so far, including key facts and references for further reading. These pages are a starting point; in every case, there’s a great deal of supporting material that we encourage you to explore.

We’ve also written up a high-level summary of the most important findings from our sandboxes.