The Lexus Eco Challenge has inspired and empowered more than 15,000 middle and high school American students to learn about the environment and take action to improve it. This fall, students are invited to participate in the fourth annual Lexus Eco Challenge for a chance to win part of $500,000 in grants and scholarships.

The Challenge has two distinct elements:

—Standards-based supplementary educational materials—encourages teachers to integrate creative lesson plans into their classrooms to help teach students about the environment.

—Competition to reward environmental action—helps young people apply what they’ve learned in class through the program to make improvements in their community.

The registration opens on September 27 and will conclude with the announcement of the first-place and grand-prize-winning teams during Earth Month, April 2011. Middle and high school teams, comprised of 5-10 students and one teacher advisor, are invited to participate in one or both of the two initial challenges, each addressing different environmental elements.

For each of the challenges, teams will define an environmental issue that is important to them, develop an action plan to address the issue, implement the plan, and report the results.  Submission deadlines are: Challenge #1 (Land/Water)—November 3, and Challenge #2 (Air/Climate)—January 19.

Each of the challenges will have 16 winning teams, as determined by the judging process,—eight middle school and eight high school teams.  Each of them will receive a total of $10,000 in scholarships and grants. In mid-February, the winning teams from the first two challenges will be invited to participate in the Final Challenge. Teams will be asked to inspire environmental action around the world through innovative ideas that are communicated to a wide audience.

From the Final Challenge entries, eight first-place teams and two grand-prize-winning teams will be selected. Each of the eight first-place teams will receive a total of $15,000 in grants and scholarships, and the two grand-prize-winning teams will each receive $30,000 to share with the students, their teacher advisors and their schools.

The Lexus Eco Challenge educational materials developed with Scholastic are designed to align with national teaching standards for science, social studies, civics and language arts. The website also has extensive tools for teachers to use in their classrooms. For each challenge, the website has lesson plans and instructions including questions to help guide a discussion about the current challenge topic, facts about the topic, and guidelines for a specific classroom project.