For my Semester 1 InnovatED, I chose Jewellery and Sculpting. Our aim was to make bracelets, anklets, rings and photo frames using recycled beads as gifts for children in hospitals. We later found out that the hospitals wouldn’t accept recycled objects, we then decided to sell out bracelets etc at the Runway Market and give all profits to the hospitals.
The process
Once we had been given the thrown out beads, all of us started destroying them to get the beads. Once we had all of the beads (a lot), some of us went through the painful process of organising the beads by colour. The rest of us tried packaging, logos, company names, messages for the children (as we still did not know that the hospitals reject recycled products). I worked on packaging with a partner.
Once we had gathered ideas, we came up our company ideas. We decided on Wishmakers. A week later we found out that the hospital doesn’t accept recycled products, and started to make the products tailored towards older recipients. We scrapped the idea of notes for the children and scrapped the idea of putting cardboard behind them so it would stand out. We found boards which we could pin the bracelets on, which we decided to use for displaying the bracelets.
We felt that we didn’t have enough variety of products (we just had bracelets) and decided to make more products. Half the class went off and made anklets and photo frames, the other half (including me), went off and made more organisational things like price stickers. I was tasked with making the price stickers which we later put on the boards and the spreadsheet, which had quite strict requirements.
At last it was time for the market. In total we managed to raise around $115 for the hospitals, although we could have raised a lot more.
We could have improved the process by:
- Coming up with a clear idea. Finding out that we had a completely different idea during the process wasn’t fun. If we had a clear idea in the first place, it would have been a lot better (the happiness of the students would be raised)
- Coming up with the selection of products in the first place. I think we should have come up with our product range in the first place, we would have more of a profit because coming up with products last minute was unproductive and made us slightly more money.
I enjoyed this InnovatED topic as it was a relaxing way to end the day. No stress in a subject felt so right and just comforting. Knowing there was (most of the time) no homework put me into a relaxed mindset which I think we all need with the rush and pressure of year 8 (especially tests). I heard from other students from other InnovatED topics how confused, bored, or stressed they were because of their topic, which made me feel better about mine. I mainly chose this InnovatED because it could involve sculpting, but if I knew that we would be doing this relaxing topic, I would have chosen it for this topic.