I attended an amazing professional development yesterday that was hosted by Trinity University. In San Antonio, we have a company called VentureLab, which bills itself as “Entrepeneurship Education for Kids.” Members from the company presented yesterday’s workshop, and led us through the steps of inventing and pitching products that solve problems.
In addition to the fact that the session was very hands-on and not a typical “sit and get” training, I found it to be extremely relevant to what many of us already teach our GT and Maker Club students. In the past couple of years, more and more “design thinking” has become embedded into the curriculum, as well as the importance of a growth mindset. Both of these are key ingredients for teaching about entrepeneurship.
I am hoping to integrate what I learned into our Genius Hour projects this year which means, yes, I’ll be tweaking that part of my curriculum once again. I’ll be using design thinking to better plan the design thinking part of my lessons.
Okay. I think I might have just blown a few neurons up with that last thought.
Anyway, I want to thank VentureLab for helping our group to develop an idea to help teachers that will one day make us so much money we won’t need the idea;)
I can’t show you the idea because you might steal it. Yep. It’s that good.
If you’re in the San Antonio and Austin areas, you should definitely check out VentureLab for more information on their camps, field trips, and school visits. They know how to make learning relevant and fun.
(P.S. A big shout-out to April, a reader of this blog, who I met at the VentureLab workshop. So glad to meet you!)
It was wonderful to meet you too. The workshop was great. Thank you for your blog. I enjoy reading it and get so many great ideas from it. Last year, my GT students created a cardboard arcade and this year I am teaching my enrichment students about having a growth mindset 🙂 Keep the awesome ideas coming. You rock !
That is so great to hear! Keep in touch, and if you ever need anything feel free to contact me at engagetheirminds@gmail.com
Thank you. I appreciate that and will take you up on it 🙂
I love the combination of entrepreneurship and inventions in this 🙂
(on an totally unrelated note, I sent you a mail a few weeks ago with a game about science learning, but not sure if you got it? anyway, thanks for your blog, love all the great ideas!)
Oh gosh – I received it and completely forgot to follow through. I will look at it tonight! Thanks for sending the link!
No problem, no hurry and sorry for the almost-stalking 🙂
I really loved it, and if you can’t use it, than that’s ok, but would be sad to get it lost because of some overactive spamfilter 😉
After we were discussing entrepreneurship and STEM (or STEAM) this morning, I received this email (daily blog-type emails I get) today. This organization (Venturelab ) in the States has entrepreneur classes for kids!
Something to check out or just an FYI! 🙂
-Ashley