In innovated this term, we participated in the $20 boss project. This is where we produced a product that had to be of high enough standard in order to sell. We were given $20 per group member to buy our materials and equipment and then later we had to pay back our $20 including $1 interest. At first, we were in a group of 6 meaning we would have been given $120 altogether but our group insisted on splitting up. In our larger group, we had many ideas such as tie dye clothing, and shrinky dink earrings. Our final product idea was tie dye clothing because most people preferred that over the earrings. We thought this was a great idea at first until we realised that buying these resources would be harder and more expensive than we thought. We tried to think of a more affordable product but in the end 4 of our members moved to a different activity while Sienna and I stayed doing $20 boss. We struggled to come up with a good product that would have satisfied our customers’ needs and wants but, in the end, we came up with a simple yet specky idea. Our final product was Scandinavian Christmas ornaments by using the school’s laser cutter. It was an efficient and easy product that would not take too long to produce yet we still managed to allow the presentation of the product to look satisfactory. Our business name was ‘Gava’ meaning gift in Swedish. In week 6 on Tuesday, we sold our products in the CPA alongside the year 3’s. Other parents and students came in to purchase some of the products that were up for sale. We ended up selling out of our product via paying back our expenses to earn $25 profit altogether.

We learned that starting a business can come with many challenges and the only way to successfully get past them is to be persistent. We faced many obstacles that have prevented us from completing our product in an efficient manner such as absences, and the laser cutting machine. The machine was struggling to function and so we had to problem solve. We ended up learning how to use it properly without the teachers help and then we managed to print an appropriate number of ornaments. Although this was a difficult process at first, we managed to succeed in our business. However, we did not get to reach our full potential due to the lack of time we left ourselves to laser cut. We learnt that leaving ourselves enough time to get a job done can be the make or break of the quality at which tasks are completed at. The holes at the top of each ornament were also very small and no matter how hard we tried we could not get one piece of string through. We began to think of other ways to get the string through like pushing it through with a needle, but we only ended up ripping the string. Our last idea was to drill a bigger hole into the ornaments and luckily this idea was successful. Doing this taught us how to problem solve in an efficient manner.

We both think we learned organisation as we had to manage out time before each market to make sure we would have a product to sell in time. Problem solving, as we faced a big problem with the hole on our ornaments and threading the string through, because the hole was too small we ended up having to spend more time drilling each ornament to make the hole bigger to get the string through, but moving forward we now know how to make the hole a bit bigger so we don’t face this problem again. Communication $20 boss strengthened our communication skills as working in a group together we had to make sure we were telling each other our opinions and ideas and made sure we shared the load of work.