One goal, three acts (002)

Hello Changemaker.

September went by fast and our Changemaker Program has gained a lot of momentum this month. We prepared lots of communication material: flyers, poster, a website (German only so far) and stickers (yay).

You may ask yourself: what exactly is the Changemaker Program? And why does the learning design look the way it does?

Well, in the beginning this program had three major ingredients:

1. project partners in the educational sector (primary and middle schools)
2. the plan to organise a lemonade stand challenge for school kids where youngsters prepare and sell self-made lemonade
3. the idea to involve students in this project.

After a few initial discussions, we realized quickly that these ingredients hold potential for a much greater program. One that potentially offers a big opportunity to achieve one of our major goals:

Every WU* student gets in contact with Entrepreneurship during his or her study.

(*WU stands for Wirtschaftsuniversität which is the German term for Business University referring to the Vienna University of Business and Economics)

From early stage concept …

… to final program.

Knowledge — Entrepreneurship Basics

Since the Changemaker Program is about preparing and inspiring future entrepreneurs, we needed to include some basic knowledge chunks into the training. With regard to the project our students were about to realize with primary school kids (see below), they needed entrepreneurial knowledge themselves in order to share it with their younger peers. But how could we reach hundreds of students and share Entrepreneurship basics with them? Online learning components seemed like a powerful option to both, reaching a big number of students and presenting content in an engaging way.

Skills — Creative Thinking and Storytelling

Knowledge is fine, but we figured that our students needed several skills to strengthen as well as immediatley practice their freshly acquired knowledge and to feel confident when sharing their knowledge with much younger peers. Since idea generation plays a major role during the project they are about to realize, we thought that empowering our students with creative thinking skills would be a good idea. In additon we added storytelling elements so that students could present their ideas and knowledge in an engaging manner. Eventually didactical skills would be essential for our students. As they are going to coach primary school kids during the project (market stand), they strongly need skills for the classroom. All of these skills will be conveyed through face to face workshops.

Project — Market Stand Challenge

The lemonade stand challenge offers a great way to involve students as coaches for their much younger peers. They could prepare the kids in several workshops and be present on the day the youngsters set up their temporary stand. We soon extended the idea of lemonade stands to market stands — why not preparing and offering all kinds of products? Students could use their new skills to ideate various options to create value together with school kids. The market day will take place in May 2018.

Illustration, Copyright: Helmut Pokornig, www.youthstart.eu

By the way — this is “LEWI” mouse, our project’s partners mascot for the primary school. Cute , right 🐭

To be continued …