ORIGINALS

A student can master the concepts of a discipline, pass demanding assessments and develop sophisticated technical or analytical knowledge.

Yet that same student may rarely have been asked to confront a problem where the requirements are incomplete, the resources are limited, the evidence is contested and no single expert can provide the answer.

This is not necessarily a failure of the student or the university.

It is a gap between the conditions under which knowledge is usually organised and the conditions under which it must eventually be used.

Real-world problems cross academic boundaries.

Knowledge and context

Knowing a principle does not automatically mean recognising when and how to apply it in an unfamiliar situation.

Disciplinary boundaries

An effective response may require technical, legal, economic, behavioural and ethical knowledge simultaneously.

Uncertainty

Real decisions often need to be made before all relevant information becomes available.

Consequences

A technically valid solution can create unintended social, economic or environmental effects.

The educational question therefore changes.

Instead of asking only whether someone has learned the required knowledge, we must also ask:

Can they recognise when it matters, connect it with what others know, decide what should be done and remain responsible for what follows?

ORIGINALS exists to create repeated opportunities to practise that transition.

Mars Challenge uses Mars as an extreme learning environment.

When resources are finite, systems are interdependent and mistakes carry consequences, assumptions that seem natural on Earth become visible.

Through Earth-Back Thinking, participants use those extreme conditions to examine problems that matter on our own planet.

ORIGINALS brings university knowledge into this environment.

Engineering may explain how a system functions. Economics may question whether it can remain viable. Psychology may reveal how people will behave. Law may determine what is legitimate. Design may reveal how a solution will be experienced.

The challenge is not simply to place these disciplines next to each other.

It is to make them change how the team understands the problem.

THE ORIGINALS LEARNING MOVEMENT

BEFORE

Disciplinary knowledge

What my field enables me to understand

MISSION

Interdisciplinary encounter

What happens when that knowledge meets other perspectives and constraints

AFTER

Responsible action

What I can now decide, build and defend

Mars Challenge changes the conditions of the problem. ORIGINALS changes the relationship between knowing and acting.

The objective is not to produce superficial generalists.

It is to develop specialists who understand the value of their own knowledge, recognise its limits and can collaborate with other specialists without losing disciplinary rigour.

Specialisation becomes more powerful when it can travel.

Academic qualifications matter. They represent structured learning, disciplinary standards and recognised achievements.

ORIGINALS does not seek to replace them.

It introduces an additional question: what happens when learners must use that knowledge to make decisions for which nobody has prepared a single correct answer?

A meaningful decision requires ownership.

The student must have room to interpret evidence, compare alternatives, accept or reject feedback and defend a choice.

Mentors, academic standards and evaluation do not disappear. They create the structure in which that authorship can become rigorous.

Agency begins when knowledge stops being only something others evaluate and becomes material for your own judgement.

Knowledge becomes readiness when it can meet reality.

Real-Life Readiness is a foundational framework that describes the integrated human capacity to mobilise knowledge, judgement, collaboration and responsibility in situations where no predetermined answer exists.

ORIGINALS provides an applied environment in which this preparation can be developed and observed.

These six dimensions are not a linear checklist or six independent skills.

They reinforce one another. Knowing without connecting can leave expertise isolated. Deciding without caring can produce harmful consequences. Caring without acting can remain an intention.

Preparation emerges through their integration.

Real-Life Readiness is currently a foundational conceptual framework, not a validated psychometric score. ORIGINALS can contribute observable evidence of learning but does not claim to certify someone's readiness for life.

ORIGINALS is not defined by the final presentation alone.

The learning process begins when students recognise their strengths, discover the knowledge they lack and encounter perspectives that challenge their assumptions.

Mars Challenge provides a structured experience in which teams investigate problems, identify causes, make decisions, prototype responses, receive feedback and explain their reasoning.

1. Recognise
2. Connect
3. Face
4. Decide
5. Act
6. Respond

This six-part arc describes the educational experience. It does not replace the official Mars Challenge methodology or establish the operational requirements of the 2027 edition.

Students learn to explain what their discipline contributes, translate their ideas to people from other fields and decide which uncertainties matter most.

They must prioritise within constraints.

They must choose between imperfect alternatives.

They must build something that makes their reasoning visible.

And they must be prepared to change course when evidence, feedback or new perspectives reveal a weakness in their proposal.

The mentor's role is to guide the process without taking authorship away from the team.

The experience is demanding because learning to decide is demanding. Time pressure, ambiguity and disagreement can create productive learning conditions, provided they serve the challenge rather than introduce unnecessary operational obstacles.

Experience becomes the curriculum. Reflection helps turn it into transferable learning.

A strong university learning experience should leave more than an attractive prototype or a competition result.

ORIGINALS aims to generate visible evidence of how students mobilise what they know.

Projects and prototypes

Evidence of research, integration, design, iteration and the capacity to defend a proposal.

Traceable decisions

A record of what a team understood, prioritised, questioned or sacrificed, and why.

Disciplinary integration

Evidence of how specialised knowledge retains its rigour while contributing to a shared response.

Judgement under uncertainty

Decisions supported by reasoning even when no complete or predetermined answer exists.

Public defence

The ability to explain a proposal, respond to objections and acknowledge its limitations.

Transfer and institutional learning

Insights that can move into new situations, alongside lessons for educators, faculties and universities.

Winning is not the only meaningful outcome.

A team may not win a competition and still demonstrate significant learning: recognising a faulty assumption, integrating unexpected expertise, responding responsibly to criticism or changing a decision after confronting evidence.

A project that continues through successive stages can make this evolution particularly visible.

The ambition is to generate portfolios in which the final solution and the path towards it can both be examined.

A good project matters. But ORIGINALS also asks what changed in the people who built it.

ORIGINALS is not simply an opportunity to work on an exciting idea.

Its educational value depends on maintaining conditions in which knowledge, autonomy and accountability meet.

These conditions matter more than whether the experience is organised as a short challenge, an institutional project or another suitable educational format.

The mission must preserve student authorship, academic rigour, responsible evaluation and opportunities for meaningful reflection.

It does not replace degrees, professional practice or specialised academic training. Nor does it guarantee funding, incubation, employment or objectively measured professional readiness.

The purpose is to add a demanding context in which students can practise using their knowledge responsibly.

Real problems do not respect faculty boundaries.

ORIGINALS opens the Mars Challenge experience to different areas of higher education, creating a shared mission without asking disciplines to abandon their identities.

The value for the institution extends beyond the students who take part.

Students

Apply academic knowledge to open problems, build a documented portfolio and practise interdisciplinary judgement.

Educators

Experience challenge-based learning as mentors, strengthen formative feedback and observe capabilities that conventional assessment may not reveal.

Faculties

Collaborate on shared challenges without dissolving disciplinary specialisation.

Research and community engagement

Connect academic knowledge with territorial problems, applied research and external stakeholders.

University leadership

Explore innovation, institutional learning and international collaboration without requiring comprehensive curricular reform.

The institutional objective is not merely to host an event.

It is to create an experience that can reveal how the university's knowledge functions when different parts of the institution must work together.

An example documented in Costa Rica describes how participating in Mars Challenge helped departments accustomed to working independently coordinate around a common objective. That cooperation subsequently influenced other internal projects.

Such experiences are qualitative indications of institutional potential, not guaranteed outcomes.

A university does not only transmit knowledge. It can design the conditions in which knowledge learns to act.

MARS CHALLENGE · GLOBAL EDITION 2027

How Much Intelligence Can the Planet Sustain?

A global challenge examining artificial intelligence in relation to physical, environmental and human limits.

Artificial intelligence is transforming access to knowledge.

Generating explanations, exploring alternatives, writing code, summarising research and producing sophisticated responses can increasingly be assisted by machines.

But making more answers available does not automatically make humans better prepared to decide what should be done with them.

For universities, this raises an important question.

If answers become abundant, what becomes more valuable about human judgement?

ORIGINALS places university students inside that question.

An engineering solution may be technically feasible but environmentally costly. An AI-generated recommendation may be convincing but based on incomplete evidence. A proposed innovation may create economic value while producing social consequences that its designers did not anticipate.

No single discipline can resolve all these tensions.

The 2027 challenge offers a context in which students can investigate AI across multiple dimensions:

• Technology: What is technically possible, and what are its limitations?
• Environment: What resources, energy and infrastructure are required?
• Law and governance: Who is accountable for decisions and their consequences?
• Economics: Which costs, benefits and dependencies does an AI system create?
• Psychology and education: How does automation change learning, behaviour, trust and human judgement?
• Humanities and ethics: Which values should guide decisions when several outcomes are possible?

The objective is not to compete with artificial intelligence by producing more responses.

It is to develop the human capacity to evaluate evidence, connect perspectives, justify decisions and act responsibly when responses are abundant.

The future will need knowledgeable specialists. It will also need specialists who know when their knowledge is not enough.

One of ORIGINALS' defining characteristics is continuity.

In the 2026 official programme, ORIGINALS identified the project route: a team could develop its original proposal through successive local, national and international stages, preserving the identity of the project rather than beginning again at every stage.

The 2027 foundational architecture builds on this principle.

ORIGINALS also becomes the identity through which higher education enters Mars Challenge.

This evolution gives the word Originals a deeper meaning.

Originality is not limited to producing an unfamiliar idea. It can also mean retaining authorship and deepening understanding as a proposal confronts evidence, criticism, constraints and new questions.

UNIVERSITY ACTIVATION MODEL

1. Align — Define institutional leadership, scope and an appropriate calendar.
2. Prepare — Support educators and mentors in methodology, feedback and student authorship.
3. Engage — Bring students from different disciplines into a common mission.
4. Challenge — Investigate, decide, prototype and defend a response through Mars Challenge.
5. Deepen — Use feedback to refine the project without discarding what has already been learned.
6. Converge — Where applicable under the official rules, progress through national and international stages and make the learning public.

The Grand Jam is the international point of convergence where different Mars Challenge missions, projects and forms of learning can meet.

For ORIGINALS, the value of that moment is not only presenting the final result.

It is showing how an idea and its authors have evolved.

A foundational roadmap for 2027–2030

1. 2027 — Foundational Cohort Universities from different contexts begin developing a shared approach to ORIGINALS, with common instruments and clear institutional identity.
2. 2028 — Protocols and Evidence Refine participant experience, teacher preparation, decision traces and institutional integration models.
3. 2029 — Academic Network Compare learning across disciplines and countries, explore longitudinal follow-up and connect institutions through The Circle.
4. 2030 — Global Infrastructure Work towards a stable higher-education network within Mars Challenge, based on cumulative learning and institutional collaboration.

These milestones describe the proposed developmental roadmap. They are not commitments that every activity or outcome is already confirmed.

The objective is not to increase the number of universities as quickly as possible.

It is to develop a model that can scale without losing the conditions that make learning meaningful.

Nothing resets. Every cycle should preserve what was learned and make the next one more rigorous.

ORIGINALS 2027 invites universities and equivalent higher-education institutions to contribute to a foundational cohort that connects academic knowledge, interdisciplinary learning and responsible action.

The invitation is not limited to institutions with large engineering faculties or established innovation laboratories.

It is for universities willing to create conditions in which students from different disciplines can confront a shared challenge and demonstrate what their knowledge can contribute.

A founding institution can help explore how to engage different faculties, prepare mentors, preserve student authorship, document decisions and learn from the experience without creating unnecessary operational burdens.

Participation also means being willing to examine what changes inside the institution.

What do students discover when their discipline meets another? What do educators learn about student capability? What new collaborations become possible? What learning remains when the event concludes?

For 2027, application opening, eligibility, official calendars and other operational conditions must be confirmed through the relevant programme documentation. Expressing interest does not constitute a formal application or guarantee participation.

When the answer key ends, learning begins.

We are not looking for universities that claim to have every answer.

We are looking for universities willing to create the conditions in which their people learn to decide when answers are no longer enough.

Knowledge becomes readiness when it can meet reality.