When Greg Schwartz first started After School Student Enterprise Teams (ASSET), an after-school entrepreneurship program for at-risk high school students, all he had were a few ice cream carts. He met with students after school, organized work teams and coached them through the process of running an ice cream business to teach critical business skills, including tracking daily sales, calculating profit and using technology to complete market research and promote products. ASSET, now recognized as having the potential of becoming a replicable education model, was one of four programs to receive a Massachusetts Education and Innovation Grant today from Microsoft Corp.’s U.S. Partners in Learning program.

Recipients of the Massachusetts Education and Innovation Grants will each receive from $50,000 to $150,000 over the next year to further develop their programs. The grants are designed to support innovative education programs in Massachusetts in the area of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with a special focus on after-school learning. The grants are funded by Microsoft’s U.S. Partners in Learning program, aimed at providing educators and schools with the tools and support they need to deliver on the promise of technology. In addition to being innovative, after-school programs focused on STEM learning, programs that win Massachusetts Education and Innovation Grants are scalable, collaborative, sustainable, sensitive to issues of equity, and successfully embrace the use of technology in teaching and learning.