Learwood News - Seventh Grade Students Participate in Shark Tank Activity
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Seventh grade students engaged in an entrepreneurial activity that applied collaboration, public speaking skills, and marketing expertise recently acquired as part of their Lorain County Joint Vocational School career exploration and in Skills Classes at Learwood Middle School. With important life skills in laser focus, students participated in an educational simulation of the popular “Shark Tank” television show on Friday, October 17th. Students formed groups and designed, created, and branded a product they felt would improve their quality of life. They utilized Learwood Makerspace devices including a 3D printer, Glow Forge, TinkerCad, sublimination printer, which proved to be fantastic resources. As part of their pitch and business plan development, students shared a logo, slogan, cost, purpose, or inspiration for the product with their target audience. Parents had the opportunity to volunteer to act as investors or "sharks" and listen to the lively presentations in the Makerspace. They were invited to ask follow-up questions and offer constructive feedback. In turn, each “shark” provided three potential dollar amounts for investment.
At the conclusion of the activity, the "sharks" decided to invest their money by writing the product name on the back of their investment amount and submitted it to the teachers. Examples of innovative products created by students included a H2Grow automatic watering system, The Switch Kick which provided interchangeable cleats to put on the bottom of shoes for use with different sports, The Easy Scoop ice cream scoop, and AquaSpace, which uses small autonomous spacecraft to extract water from nearby asteroids for use by NASA and SpaceX missions. Congratulations to all student entrepreneurs who worked together to develop innovative products while using important skills learned and reinforced in various educational settings. Thank you to staff members and parents for providing the framework and planning to help bring this activity to life.
