In a classroom at the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy in Atlanta, a small group of high school girls is growing vegetables—but not in any ordinary garden. After lots of tinkering, and plenty of trial-and-error, the girls have managed to turn a corner of their classroom into a miniature greenhouse they’ve designed and built themselves. Using PVC pipes and plastic sheeting for the frame, this “smart garden” uses automated sensors to water and monitor the plants. The result is a way to grow vegetables year-round, in a community where access to fresh produce isn’t always easy to come by.
For the girls who built it, the idea for the garden started with a simple question: What’s a challenge in your hometown, and what can you create to help? The question is at the heart of the Ciena Solutions Challenge, an ongoing initiative from Ciena and Digital Promise, which invites middle- and high-school students and teachers around the globe to design unique solutions to local challenges. Awardees—like the students at the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy—are given $3,000 to sustain and scale their projects. Like the automated garden, the results have the power to transform entire communities for the better.
This kind of real-world problem-solving is at the heart of Powerful Learning, a research-based model developed by Digital Promise. Built around four core pillars of connection, agency, purpose, and curiosity, this model encourages students to see themselves as active participants in learning, and to identify problems that matter to them while using tools—like AI—to make an impact. By supporting these projects, the Ciena Solutions Challenge helps students put the principles of Powerful Learning into practice and produce meaningful, real-world results.
Across the globe, other Ciena Solutions Challenge awardees are using ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of their own communities to address urgent problems, from rising rates of oral cancer to protecting homes and families during floods. The projects look different, but share a common starting point: Seeing a problem, and doing something about it.
Staying Safe when Floods Hit
Across the world in Indonesia, where the yearly rainy season stretches from November to March, flooding is a common problem. While rising waters are dangerous enough on their own, floods can also turn ordinary household electrical systems into serious hazards, and increase the risk of electrical shock for families in the affected areas.
Students at State Vocational High School 1 Paringin saw an opportunity to make homes safer. Their solution, a device they call FlowSafe, is their way “to improve community safety,” which is a particularly urgent goal. In December 2025, floods in the region affected more than 10,000 people and inundated more than 3,000 homes.
With FlowSafe, the device monitors rising water levels within a home in real time and automatically shuts off power when the water reaches a preset threshold. The system can also automatically restore power once the floodwaters recede. Homeowners can customize the water-level threshold, allowing the system to adapt to the layout and the needs of different homes. Beyond just making individual homes safer, however, FlowSafe can also trigger community alarms and send updates through Blynk and WhatsApp to local residents so they can monitor water levels and potential hazards in real time.
According to the students, getting FlowSafe from an idea to a working prototype involved plenty of challenges, including testing and refining the device, and trying to understand what worked and what didn’t. The end result, though, is a technology designed to give families peace of mind, and something that removes a serious hazard before it becomes deadly.
Early cancer detection, now within reach
In India, people face the world’s highest rate of oral cancer, accounting for almost 30 percent of cases in the entire world. The burden is particularly heavy in rural areas, where limited access to healthcare can make it harder to detect and treat cancer when it’s in early, more manageable stages.
For five students at Santamayee Girls’ High School in West Bengal, this challenge presented an opportunity for them to rethink how oral cancer is screened—and who is able to do it. With support from the Ciena Solutions Challenge, the students were able to develop a low-cost, AI-powered screening tool that uses a smartphone to identify oral tissue that might warrant a closer look. Users can scan the insides of their mouth, and the AI model then analyzes patterns in the color, shape, and texture of the tissue. From there, the tool can identify any potentially suspicious tissue that may need a doctor’s evaluation—all within a matter of minutes.
The goal isn’t to replace doctors or provide a diagnosis. Instead, the tool is designed as an important first step in the cancer screening process: identifying people who may be at greater risk, and giving them an awareness they can take to their healthcare providers.
Impact beyond borders
For these students, building a solution is just the beginning. The teams behind all three projects are already thinking about how their ideas can reach people within and outside their communities and leave a lasting impact. In West Bengal, for example, the students at Santamayee Girls’ High School envision bringing their oral cancer screening tool into village health camps, schools, and using them within community outreach programs. In Atlanta, the girls at the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy hope to scale their automated garden to supplement what’s available at the local food bank, and also help families within Atlanta build and implement automated gardens in their own homes. Each solution is well on its way to improving lives outside the classroom, and ultimately helping build a better world.
Are you an educator or student who has an idea? Educators can register for the Ciena Solutions Challenge at CienaChallenge.org.
