Kid Biz Entrepreneurship Workshop

For the past week, I have been busy. I had the opportunity to teach school children in a workshop about entrepreneurship. This opportunity was presented to me by Dr. Aarthi, the Head of Operations, Innovation Park. 

Now... here's the thing. I didn't think she knew me that well. I was really surprised that she came to me and asked me to be the resource person - or trainer - for this whole thing. If it was one of my professors, I wouldn't have been surprised, but this took me off guard. 

Regardless, I said yes. 

She said that she had a template and an outline of how the program should go - including the concepts that I would need to teach. However, she said that it was totally up to me as to how I wanted to teach it. I decided to gamify it. I realized that children might think that a workshop teaching something like entrepreneurship might be dull and boring - like a lecture. I wanted to make sure that didn't happen. I tried hard to think of a game or activity for each concept, teaching through games and activities - promoting active learning. Of course, it couldn't all be that way. There were some concepts that needed to be taught as such. There, I tried to put them between games, to make sure the students stayed on board and energetic. 

I found that that idea really worked. The students remained energetic throughout the whole day - the whole week rather. As someone who hasn't really taught formally before (minus my SLP), this was something really fascinating to see. They actually wanted to hear what I had to say. I was interesting and able to keep their attention, which is exactly what I wanted to do through the games. 

Throughout the course of the week, the students learned about entrepreneurship - starting from self awareness and leadership skills, to team building, to finding a problem and writing a problem statement, to building a solution to that problem, to building a real product (a website per team), and all the way until making a business model and presenting their ideas in the form of a pitch. 

Today, the students presented their ideas in the form of a proper business pitch, in front of their parents. The parents and students were really satisfied with what they learnt and with my teaching, which was the cherry on top. 

I loved seeing this whole thing come together and see the confidence with which my students presented themselves. It was magnificent. 

In the middle of the week, one of my professors saw me teaching, and that again was a full circle moment. I asked him to come in and talk to the students for a minute, but he said that it was my time to shine and inspire people. It felt really good to get that from one of my favorite teachers. 

I look forward to doing this again and learning even more than I did this time.