Back in March, Kichwa Coders was invited to participate in a Buckinghamshire Education Business Partnership (BEBP) at the Great Marlow School.
Kichwa Coders was asked by BEBP if we could provide a mentor for an Enterprise Day. I volunteered to attend the 18th of March session for year 10 students (14-15 years old). The day focussed on a brief prepared by Urban Media looking to get input from the students on a new Family Entertainment Centre to be located in South Bucks.
An Enterprise Day is a day for the students to experiment with some real life business problems. The school or a company from the community puts forward a real life challenge to the students, and under the guidance of a group of mentors they come up with a solution and then present the results back to the mentors and their peers.
In the case of the Urban Media challenge, the class of approximately 200 year 10 students were divided up into teams of 8 students each. The teams had about 4 hours to read the brief, and complete a set of tasks before finally presenting their results to a couple of the other teams. The tasks were:
- coming up with a name for the family entertainment centre,
- create an advertising campaign which included 2 posters, a radio ad script and a storyboard for a TV ad,
- develop two “zones” in the centre, a learning zone and a gaming zone, the result of which should be a diagram for the zone detailing the activities and look and feel of the zone
- come up with the concept for two additional zones and provide the same material as above
- create a presentation to explain to Urban Media, the mentors and fellow students what the team came up with.
As you can see, the students had a huge amount of work to do. I was mentoring three of the teams providing them with guidance and encouragement on these tasks. Some of the students really impressed me with the level of dedication to this task, clearly demonstrating a level of maturity ahead of their age. The result was that all the teams did a very good job, and even though I thought it was a very short time to complete so many tasks most of the teams did.
The Enterprise Days are very good days for everybody involved. The students have an opportunity to complete some real world experience, the mentors get invigorated by the unbounded energy of teenagers, and the sponsoring company gets invaluable ideas from brainstorming with so many people. I am really looking forward to next year’s round of BEBP Enterprise Days.
Kichwa Coders 