Our Mini Quest is only three weeks, we covered a lot in a short period of time. We started out the session with each of the students acting as a component of a circuit by pretending to be a battery, resistor, LED, wires, and switch. They would pass electrons (paper electrons) to each other to show the flow of electricity through the circuit. After the exercise, each student built their own physical circuits and then we had a socratic discussion about Ohm's Law (relationship between Voltage, Current, & Resistance). We then introduced them to some programs where they built virtual circuits in an online application. We eventually stepped them up into using breadboards, transistors, and Arduinos (micro-controllers) so they could wire their own prototype circuits.
In parallel to learning about circuits, they were building their a storyboard of a Hero's Journey. The whole thing was launched using the examples that you provided in the last parent meeting. They were divided up into teams of two and each team had to come up with a backstory of a hero. Each team pitched their character and backstory and the group voted on "the best backstory". This character ended up being the main character in the final Hero’s Journey Exhibition.
Each team created a part of the Hero's Journey (Call To Adventure, Allies/Mentors, Road Of Trials, Final Showdown, and Return Home) with their new hero. All the teams had to work together to come up with their own part of a cohesive storyboard. This took a lot of effort for the team to self organize, and we had a great discussion about what are the advantages and disadvantages about organization making decisions in a democratic versus executive way.
After they finalized the storyboard, they had to use their new circuit skills to help them tell the story of the Hero in the final exhibition.
Entrepreneurship ~ Session Four
We are diving into the basics of entrepreneurship. We started the session with an exercise digging into the type of people that they are and what types of opportunities they see in the world. The questions they needed to wrestle with were:
1) Is there a great injustice in the world they would like to solve?
2) Is there a problem that they see that can be fixed by starting a business?
3) Do they have a special gift that aligns with starting a specific type of business?
As the quest continues, the Eagles will be introduced to:
Unit Economics
Basics Of Operations
Competition/Substitutes/Risk
Marketing
Setting Prices
Business Plans
As we introduce the concepts above, we are going to have some competitions that will allow some of the students to go to an Acton MBA case discussion, and we will Shark Tank type presentations to win prize money for their start up costs for the business fair.
