Improving the literacy and numeracy skills of our Province's children, to better prepare them for kindergarten was the goal behind a North Forge hosted Open Innovation Challenge hosted by Morden Collegiate Tuesday.

The Manitoba Open Innovation Challenge was designed to engage the community in generating ideas to solve complex social issues. For this inaugural event, North Forge is asking the community to help solve the concerningly low national ranking Manitoba holds for child literacy and numeracy skills.

This event welcomed students from a variety of schools from the Pembina Valley in addition to the moderators and other adults interspersed amongst the students.

President of North Forge said the students brought forward a wealth of great ideas for ways to help increase literacy and numeracy in children under the age of five.

Invision Edge, a company who helped conduct the event helped engage the students and lead them through a variety of exercises during the over three-hour event.

"The types of ideas completely run the gamut," said North Forge President Jeff Ryzner. "We have people some really cool physical toys that kids could play with that could teach them letters and numbers."

Ryzner noted other ideas coming forward were adding more literacy and numeracy to some existing programs, software apps, virtual programs, using social media, and software apps.

"The ideas coming out are just brilliant and they're all over the place, which is what we were looking for," said Ryzner. "This is because there's no one silver bullet that's going to solve everything."

He added the more ideas the better to help solve the issue at hand.

Another idea coming forward would have a child take a picture of an object and it would then tell the child what the object was and how to spell it.

Ryzner said it didn't take the students very long to open up and start sharing their ideas and to start building on others ideas.

"The students worked to generate ideas which they take away, North Forge does not hold on to anything created at the sessions," said Project Lead Suzanne Braun. "They can make the choice to further develop their ideas as an individual or team and submit them by February 22nd."

Braun added the session is designed to give people skills to develop and empower them to think outside the box.

Students from various schools in the Pembina Valley were in attendance at the event hosted at Morden Collegiate.