This semester, me and 10 other kids from year 9 and 10 chose to take part in an elective named “Leadership & Innovation”, with the main objective being to design a toy directed at children in the early learning centre. I chose this elective to further advance my experience with entrepreneurship. I have experience in this area as in year 7 we held a Christmas market, where you and a group of students would create a product to sell at a convention held on the common area of the school. My group decided to sell succulents in pots that we had decorated. It wasn’t our first design though, we had originally wanted to design phone cases but later found that the materials we had planned to use weren’t strong enough and that we also had to account for all types of phones. In year 8, I also took part in a course named $20 boss where we had $20 to make products to sell (not $20 per product, $20 to make as many as we can). My group decided to make pillow cases with different images printed on them. This idea wasn’t very successful but we still managed to make a profit.

Identifying Strengths & Passions

We were requested that we took part in a survey/quiz to see what our top 5 strengths. The questions were multiple choice from 1-5. We were required to rank whether the question was a lot like us or unlike us. As seen below my top strengths is Humor, followed by Curiosity, Judgement, Honesty, and lastly Creativity, in order.

Businesses build themselves around certain areas so that they can effectively utilize the skills and strengths of workers. This quiz helps us in our endeavours as we can assign tasks to each group member based on what their strengths, skills, and passions were to achieve a desirable outcome.

Design Thinking Process

The Design Thinking Process refers to the steps that businesses take to solve a problem. Those steps being: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Each step has links between other steps, not just in chronological order; Empathise links with prototype, if your prototype fails, you go back to the ideate, if your test fails, you go back to define. By taking these steps you can ensure that the problem gets solved. As of right now, my group is in the ‘Define’ stage close to ideate, as we understand the problem at hand, that being to design a toy for children in the early learning centre, and already have a plan of what we can do.

Our Plan

Our group decided that we want to design different puzzles for the children in the early learning centre using a grid and geometric shapes.

In order for the toy to be safe for kids we need to make sure the pieces aren’t a choking hazard by making them at least 4cm x 4cm. We will also make the corners of the board round so they aren’t able to hurt them self e.g. poking them in the eye.

This is all we have gotten up to in this task as of right now and it is far from completion.