In 1994, The Abell Foundation launched an ambitious effort to provide an accelerated math and science curriculum to eligible Baltimore City middle- and high-school students. The goal of the Ingenuity Project is to nurture and develop city public school students' interest and achievement in math and science. One measure of the effectiveness of this intense and highly focused program is student success in competing in the Intel Science Talent Search. Baltimore City Public Schools have not had a finalist in 50 years.

As of March 2005, the Ingenuity Project achieved its initial goal with its first Intel finalist: Senior Ryan Harrison finished 5th in the country for his bioinformatics and genometrics project, "A Novel Approach to Modeling pH Sensitive Regions within Proteins. Again in 2006 Ingenuity boasted two Intel semi-finalists with Myers Abraham Davis advancing as a finalist with his project, "Bounding Sphere Images: A Parametric Bounding Volume Hierarchy for Collision Detection on the GPU." Mr. Davis was the only big city public school finalist in the country.

There are currently 300 Ingenuity students studying at the middle-school level and nearly 150 students at the highly selective high school portion of the program housed at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Another 80 students participate in Ingenuity's elementary program.

Ingenuity high-school graduates have attended prestigious colleges and universities including: Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, University of Maryland College Park, Washington University in St. Louis, Morehouse and others.