Category: Innovation & Enterprise

INTRODUCTION⁓

In InnovatED in Term 4 we started on the Christmas Market Project. The Christmas Market is an event All Saints holds every year. Students get into groups and brainstorm product ideas. After brainstorming ideas, we decide on our favourite idea, while also thinking about the affordability of our idea. After deciding on an idea, we research further into it and prepare a pitch for our teachers. If your idea gets approved, you can get the loan money of $30 and start producing your product. Each group then has a couple of weeks to make the products as well as some posters to display around the school. Throughout the whole process we were also doing Economics in Humanities which helped getting through process a lot. Then it is time to sell at lunch time with a float and table decorations. After the process of selling our products, we count up our money and see if we made a profit. After paying back the loan money all of the excess money goes to a charity. In our case it was Salvation Army which is a charity that gives to the less fortunate.

OUR IDEA AND OUR PRICING⁓

My Christmas Market Idea was stickers, and our business name was Sticker Stack. When my group and I were brainstorming we wanted an affordable easy idea that would also sell well. My group wanted our product to be a reasonable, affordable price, whilst also allowing us to make a profit. We made lots of designs and made singular stickers along with sticker sheet that consist of 4 different designs. We did two base design topics: Christmas and Food. We did deals of 1 sticker sheet for $2, 2 sticker sheets for $3 and 3 sticker sheets for $5. My groups original idea was to sell a singular sticker for 50c. We ran into an obstacle with that pricing though. We could not sell our products for 50c because the pricing had to be whole numbers. This caused us to re-think our pricing, so we change to 2 stickers for $1. That when we had a customer’s opinion prior to the market make us re-think the pricing once again. We got told that selling a sticker for 50c cents each was too expensive, and that people would not buy them at this price. So, we changed the pricing to 3 stickers for 1 which meant 1 sticker was $0.33 each and the cost price was about 20c per sticker. This means singular stickers would only make about $0.13 cents profit each.

Throughout the time of the market supply and demand was changing. Towards the end we decided because the supply of our stickers was high, we would decrease the pricing of our sticker sheets. The sheets were originally $2.00 for 1 sheet. But we changed the pricing to $1.00 for 1 sheet. This drew a few more customers towards our stall. We also decided to go 50% store wide since we still had a large supply of products, and we would hopefully increase demand. Our competition was the stall next to us selling pre-made Christmas cards and they had completely discounted to products and that stole some of our customers away. This caused us to decrease our prices too.

In the end we did manage to make a profit of $2.02, but because we decreased the pricing, we did not make a large profit.

WHAT I’VE LEARNT⁓

Throughout the whole Christmas Market Process, I have learnt a lot. From pricing to designs all the way to the social aspect.

If I were to do the whole market process again, I would completely change the product we were selling. I would choose a product that was not so labour intensive and that I was confident would sell. Stickers were a very labour intensive product and require a lot of time to make. Customer demand was also a big aspect of this process. Our stall did not have much customer demand because people just bought them with their spare change after purchasing more expensive items. If we sold I completely different product, then we may have got more demand which would cause us to decrease the supply and increase the sales. This will there for increase the profit made. Stall location is also another big aspect due to the weather. There was a lot of wind and rain on the day of the market so, the locations of the stalls were all very different. Our location was away from the wind, but inside the breakout space so not as many people new that our stall was there. It was out of the way and not as much of a hot spot as some other stall locations. Having a stall close to the entrance would increase customers visiting the stall and purchasing our products. The packaging of the product generally is what sells the product. For our stickers we packaged them in draw string bags, so they did not fly away and so that people had a cute little bag to keep afterwards. If we did not have packaging to place the products in, we might not have sold as much. I would change the packaging colours to Christmas colours as well so that if this was a gift for someone it was already in packaging to give it to them. Before pursuing the product though I would check the availability of resources and materials to make the product though. If the resources were not available, I would re-think the product I am making. Overall the Christmas Market Project was a learning opportunity for everyone no matter weather you made a profit or not.

CAPABILITIES AND CONCLUSION⁓

The Christmas Market Project required a lot of Collaboration, Effective Communication and Creativity. We had to collaborate with our peers and our teachers to create a good Christmas market product as well as making a profit. We also had to communicate with many students, staff, and customers that were buying from our stall because socializing with the customers is what sells the product. Finally, we needed be really creative with the designs of our products especially because our products are hand draw and are completely original designs. Overall, the Christmas Market was a fun experience that taught us me and my group a lot about Economics.

Introduction to Project Utopia

During InnovatED these past two terms we have been working on Project Utopia for Fremantle Port. This Project is a about re-designing Fremantle Port after it moves to Kwinana in an estimate of 10 years. We worked in groups and with our class to collaborate and create ideas that will benefit the environment, as well the people living in Fremantle. Eventually we moved into separate groups in our class and brainstormed ideas onto a vision board. My groups focus was clean energy and entertainment that was sustainable and fun. After that we moved into another set of groups and our focus was transportation. We wanted sustainable and affordable transportation for everyone in Fremantle. After brainstorming different options we settled on a Tram system. With our mixed knowledge of Transport and Sustainability we designed our Tram system on a model and on a digital platform called Co-Space. After refining our ideas and adding more detail we presented our ideas to our class as well as our parents.

Our Ideas and the Global Goals Connected

Our ideas resolved into a sustainable and affordable tram system. This tram system goes all around Fremantle, making travelling around Fremantle very reliable and easy. At the very start of the Project Utopia process my first group focused on sustainability so personally I wanted to incorporate my knowledge of sustainability. We are incorporating sustainability by using solar panels instead of non-renewable energy to decrease climate change and a negative environmental impact.

The Global Goals that are related to our ideas are:

• 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities – This is because our tram system is trying to decrease the environmental impact of transportation, by decreasing the size of most transportation vehicles.
• 13 Climate Action – Climate Action is very important and we wanted to make sure that this system supported climate action. To decrease the amount of fossil fuels created by transportation we are using solar panels instead non-renewable energy sources. The trams will have solar panels on top of them to power them.
• 14 Life Below Water – By using renewable energy, we are decreasing the negative impact of creature that are living in the ocean near the port. Our precious Great Barrier Reef in Queensland is slowly losing its natural reef due to the amount of fossil fuels created. By using clean energy we are decreasing the likeness of this happening to our reefs in Fremantle.

Visiting Fremantle

As a cohort, Year 7 visited Fremantle and got to explore a number of locations including, the jetty, part of the loading dock, and some of the Maritime Museum. Visiting Fremantle gave us a first hand experience of what the Port looked like and the sheer size of it. Getting to explore also informed us of what buildings or structures we wanted to preserve to keep Fremantle authentic. When we visited there were thousands of shipping containers, which took up a lot of space, so while we were there, we took into consideration how much empty space there will be. This is because Fremantle Port is mainly industrial.

As part of visiting we had to fill out a booklet with a variety of different questions for us to fill out. This booklet helped us in the future, to re-fresh our memory of Fremantle and gave us something to work up from.

Vision Board and Information Report

After visiting Fremantle we got put into groups and brainstormed ideas that would benefit the people of Fremantle and the environment. My group focused clean energy and entertainment. Our ideas were a aquarium that supports endangered species that live in the ocean. Our other ideas were green spaces and community batteries. Because Fremantle is mainly industrial we wanted to make sure that there were places for people to have some space and relax. We also wanted to create community batteries in suburbs to make sure we are using our energy to its full potential. After creating vision boards to showed all of our ideas, we presented them to our grandparents.

The next step of the process was to make a detailed report of our ideas which explained everything we wanted to do in thorough detail. This was a source we could relay on when we needed to explain our ideas.

Liveability

Eventually our Humanities subject was liveability which definitely helped to understand if our ideas suited Fremantle. We did research on what liveability factors would benefit Fremantle the most. This resulted in us doing an assessment on liveability. The assessment was us trying to find similarities between a chosen city and our Fremantle Port ideas.

Re-thinking Fremantle

After looking into all the liveability factors we re-thought our ideas for Fremantle in small random groups. We focused on small questions to help us create more innovative ideas. These questions included how to get from A to B?, what kind of entertainment will there be?, is the project sustainable?, etc. This resulted in us changing our ideas completely and getting into groups for the final idea.

CoSpace

CoSpace is a digital platform that we used to present our ideas. It is a detailed 3D model that you can place objects on. We used the background of Fremantle Port as a base for us to work up from. Our idea was a tram system, so we placed cylinders that represented train stations. After placing the tram stations we added train tracks to show where the tram system ran. After finalising the stations we moved on to entertainment in our allocated sections. We labelled each entertainment buildings as well as the tram stations. We also placed buses on the areas that the trams didn’t run. The forms of entertainment we made were Movie Theatre, Parks, Shopping centres, Day care centres and etc.

Model

As well as making a digital model, we created a physical model. We hot glue to scale structures that represented all of our structures. We had to research the scale of Fremantle and our model. After that we cut out the buildings/structures and glued them on. We highlighted the tram stations in Fluro so people new not to design on top on the tram stations. As the physical model was a shared with the whole class and split into 8 sections, we had to work around people.

Presentation and Conclusion

After refining our models both digitally and physically we put together a presentation as a group. This presentation was a detailed explanation of what our ideas were and how we were going to execute them. We presented our models and our speech both to the class and our parents. We learnt our speeches off by heart and resisted our speeches to them. We first presented to the class once. Then when the parents came we had about 6 groups of 7 that we presented to. This meant if we made mistakes the first time we would have corrected them by the third. After every speech we explained the models further so that the parents could have a more thorough knowledge. We also answered all their questions about our ideas.

Overall, the whole of Project Utopia gave us a deeper knowledge of how to design real life buildings and structures, what the cost of living is and how to work through that, and how people live their daily lives. I believe that my group and I came up with great ideas and that Fremantle would be great with all of our designs.