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!)