Students Put Ideas to the Test During Innovation & Entrepreneurship Pitch Day

What happens when students are handed a real problem, a real audience and no answer key?

That was the challenge during the most recent Perry Township Innovation & Entrepreneurship Pitch Day. Local businesses, organizations and community partners brought real problems for students to solve. Each group had to understand its challenge, consider who it affected and research possible solutions. Then, students had to decide what they believed could actually work.

Taking a Coffee Business on the Road

For one group, the challenge was figuring out how Mally Coffee Roasters could take its business on the road.

Students designed a mobile coffee cart that could fit inside a standard van while still providing power, water, storage and enough room to serve customers. They quickly learned that a good idea also had to work in practice.

Would everything fit inside the van? Where would the equipment go? How would the cart move from place to place? Students had to consider how someone would actually use their design during a normal workday.

Designing Around the Customer

Another group tackled a completely different challenge involving wheelchair maintenance services.

Students explored how customers might find the service, schedule appointments and move through the process. They also created a user persona to better understand the people who might need the service. This helped them consider possible barriers and look at the experience from the customer’s point of view.

Other students worked on a challenge much closer to home. They helped shape the identity of Perry Township Schools’ Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program by developing branding ideas and presenting two logo concepts for review.

For Endress+Hauser, students explored how STEM activities could work for different age groups. An activity designed for a high school student may not work for an elementary student. Students had to consider how to introduce science, technology, engineering and problem-solving concepts in ways that would be engaging and age appropriate.

Learning Without an Answer Key

Although every project looked different, students followed a similar process. They asked questions, researched, collaborated, disagreed, made decisions and changed direction when needed. They also had to explain why they believed one idea worked better than another.

Then came Pitch Day.

Students stood in front of an audience and presented their work. That experience made the projects feel different from a traditional classroom assignment. There was no answer waiting in the back of a book, and the people listening could potentially use the ideas students presented.

The problems existed outside the classroom, so the solutions had to work there too.

That experience reflects the purpose of Perry Township Schools’ Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program. Students work through real challenges while strengthening communication, creativity, collaboration, reasoning and decision-making skills.

Finding the Next Problem

The next challenge will bring the process even closer to the students themselves.

Instead of receiving a problem from a business or community partner, students will identify problems they notice in their own lives and communities. From there, they will begin developing solutions of their own.

Because learning how to solve a problem starts with learning how to notice one.