In term 4 2020, all of the year 7 students made groups and were tasked with coming up sustainable and innovative products to sell at the end of year Christmas Market.

Our business was called Just Live, as we wanted our customers to associate a sense of serenity with our business.

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This term we focused on economics. We looked at this topic in Hass, English and Innovate Ed. Economics involved us learning about advertising, types of buyers, producers, supply and demand. This learning concluded with us selling our products to the student body and making a profit to donate to charity.

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This project involved us using the ASC core capabilities to challenge the way we thought and explore new ways of thinking. We had to be organised, collaborative, creative, inquisitive and effective communicators. These factors helped create an innovative business and push our boundaries to come up with a product with our own twist.

This project involved us to think outside of the box by realising that economics is not about what we want but what the buyers want. In this term for hass I found it challenging as I didn’t have prior knowledge about economics but as the term went on, I used the ASC core capabilities of organisation, inquisitiveness and resilience to help me understand economics further.

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Later in hass we put our learning into action by playing skeleton island in class, the aim of the game was to earn money by competing with the other buyers and selling the exact same products. I was one of the five sellers in this game and used the economical concept of needs and wants to base by prices. Each round Cody and I were by far the best sellers, but I ended up winning the game by charging a tremendous amount of money for the scarcer items. This game taught me that by pricing your items right and by watching your competitors you can end up with a lot of money.

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For innovate Ed we followed the design thinking process with our groups. We started by surveying students from different class on gifts, receiving gifts and what Christmas means to them. The next stage of the design thinking process was to define, this is the stage where we had to define what our customer’s needs and wants were. Once we had empathised and defined, we moved onto ideating where we came up with many ideas for products. We had some problems with the stage since all the ideas that we had come up with were not innovative or were taken. After a week of this stage eventually came up with our product of wire rings.

We then had to make some practice rings for the prototype stage, this was one of the most challenging stages of the design thinking process as we had not had practice making rings before. We improved as we made more rings so by the time we had to pitch to our investors, we had some very high-quality rings. After we had made some prototypes, we went into the testing phase where we went around to different students and asked for their feedback. We changed our approach based on their feedback and made an even better product.

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Before the market we were tasked to advertise our business, this meant we had to come up with an advertisement and innovative ways to spread the word about our business. My group made advertisements and placed them strategically around the school to attract the eye of our target consumers. By placing advertisements around the school we were able to attract our buyers attention so they would remember us on the market day.

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The final stage of the design thinking process is implemented, this was the stage where we built our business and sold our products at the Christmas Market. This went well since we sold all our products, and our business ran very smoothly. It could have gone even better if we had premade a few more bags since we had to make more as the market went on, but overall, our business was a success.