The Boston Artscience Prize was a free, afterschool program open to any students in the Boston Public Schools. Each year, they brought staff and students together to dream and invent, coming up with original project ideas inspired by the program’s annual scientific theme. Ranging from Neuroinformatics to Synthetic Biology to The Future of Energy, students worked in teams to develop ideas that would engage some of the open questions in these fields—or else ask brand new questions people hadn’t considered before.

Working with their program mentors and reaching out to other community resources for support, student teams worked for a full year developing, refining, and testing their idea through research and experimentation, culminating in a final presentation to a jury of experts in fields related to the year’s theme. In the end, teams were granted funding to support their continued work on their projects in an ongoing studio-based program called startUp.