As part of a week-long induction into the Sixth Form, our Fifth Form boys enjoyed a day filled with challenges and goals all designed to help them think entrepreneurially. A core focus for the school is to teach boys to not only generate ideas, but also to have the ability to bring them to fruition, and our first ever E-Day (Entrepreneur Day) was designed to do just this. Run by our Entrepreneur in Residence, Zubair Junjunia, the day was centred around finding solutions to tackle the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) developed by the United Nations.
To help get the boys thinking differently, they were randomly assigned a SDG target and a focus of either a local or global lens. Over the day, they were guided using frameworks through stages of empathising with people affected by their specific global challenge, generating ideas and developing a prototype to solve it, before finally pitching to convince their peers of their solution.
The boys came up with some wild ideas: developing a high-speed, never-stopping global train network to deliver clean water throughout the world, collecting rainwater in giant boxes floating in the Atlantic, and even thermal-electric generators that would recycle all lost heat energy. However, the winning pitch went to #LoveGreen for a Pokémon Go-style app that encouraged locals to pick up litter and reward them for doing so.
Mr Junjunia said, “Collaborative learning, design thinking and enterprise planning – with the support of frameworks, the boys were able to apply these critical skills in developing a solution to solve our global challenges. Speaking to the groups, one thing that blew me away was their depth of perception as they took a broad global goal and drilled down to identify a specific group affected and empathised with their needs and challenges.”