WE DID IT
I feel like we crossed a threshold last night with the program. Just yesterday a two page article appeared in the Star-Advertiser about our program.
More importantly, we held our big event. Over a hundred guests came to see the exposition and panel. The students had professional looking kits and displays, were grilled relentlessly by the audience and held their ground, and spoke like confident entrepreneurs to the investors. One team was indeed funded, and though the other teams were crestfallen, a few have vowed to improve their designs and seek funding in round two. One student has enrolled in a Stanford course on finance and is looking at using recycled materials in order to lower the costs. Another team has already secured funding and an opportunity to teach elementary schoolchildren about aquaponics.
I realized last night that this event is true final exam - if the goal of a final is to show everything you have learned and indicate you are ready move on, consider that every team successfully researched and designed and engineered and built a working aquaponics system and learned the arts of rhetoric and narrative and graphic design. Every single team accomplished this!
And I think we have knocked a serious dent in the argument that learning has to happen in the traditional way to ensure success in life. I have never seen motivation and excitement in my classroom the way I have this year, and I have never seen kids work so hard on something that didn’t a grade attached to it. I think we have also possibly sowed the seed for a bigger movement in the state towards entrepreneurial education - something that any number of schools might wish to join.
More importantly, we held our big event. Over a hundred guests came to see the exposition and panel. The students had professional looking kits and displays, were grilled relentlessly by the audience and held their ground, and spoke like confident entrepreneurs to the investors. One team was indeed funded, and though the other teams were crestfallen, a few have vowed to improve their designs and seek funding in round two. One student has enrolled in a Stanford course on finance and is looking at using recycled materials in order to lower the costs. Another team has already secured funding and an opportunity to teach elementary schoolchildren about aquaponics.
I realized last night that this event is true final exam - if the goal of a final is to show everything you have learned and indicate you are ready move on, consider that every team successfully researched and designed and engineered and built a working aquaponics system and learned the arts of rhetoric and narrative and graphic design. Every single team accomplished this!
And I think we have knocked a serious dent in the argument that learning has to happen in the traditional way to ensure success in life. I have never seen motivation and excitement in my classroom the way I have this year, and I have never seen kids work so hard on something that didn’t a grade attached to it. I think we have also possibly sowed the seed for a bigger movement in the state towards entrepreneurial education - something that any number of schools might wish to join.
