The Wannabees Design Challenge

Students work in teams to create a fictional company, assign various corporate responsibilities to team members, brainstorm a product concept, ‘build’ a prototype using popular arts and crafts products, create a 60-second video commercial that would be used to ‘sell’ the product, and produce an electronic presentation that details their activities, successes or failures, and define what they have learned from the process.

Participating students have ‘tons-of-fun’ in this competitive team activity as they dream up a unique product working in small teams in person or remotely in the evenings or weekends using their cell phones/emails and free time in school. Participating students engage in a peer review process within teams, which is preceded by a short ‘Language Counts!’ life lesson as part of the activity ‘set-up.’

Students must present their ideas, their entire product proposal (including team expertise), and their 60-second commercial to teachers who select the best and forward them to The Internship Depot volunteer business Mentors who select the final winners.

Winning teams get a small prize.

However, some of the most important work happens after the project is done as students participate in a self-/peer- review process after reviewing information about how businesses use evaluations as a tool that produces improved performance from every employee.

Strengthen Your Core – On the Starting Block

We start focusing students on building content for their résumés in eighth grade. We don’t have them ‘write’ their résumés, — we ask them to start recording information they will use on their résumés in the future. we ask them to start building content for those documents by recording year-to-year improvement in their academic performance, attendance, and behaviors.

Having started with basic information we presented to them in eighth grade through our proprietary middle school curriculum called The First Rung, we continue to build on that messaging and strongly suggest they continue doing annual self-evaluations starting in ninth grade. This is the first of four ‘Resume Review Activities’ that span every year in high school and is best rooted in English class.

While short, this period of self-evaluation will help them define their core competencies and set goals for improving same. We show freshmen how they can quantify their current and future academic and social performance with data over the course of the next three years to build a better story for the résumés they will need to write in senior year.