This animation was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award.

For more information on Sir Ken’s work visit: www.sirkenrobinson.com

Brampton teenagers displayed their minds for business and a social conscience during a unique competition for high school students.

For the last several years, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board’s Business Subject Council has organized a business conference and competition created to get students thinking about launching entrepreneurial ventures that are both environmentally and socially responsible.

Ideaopolis was held last month at the Renaissance Convention Centre. More then 450 Grade 10 students from 12 schools across Brampton and Mississauga participated. Students from Brampton’s St. Roch Secondary School were awarded gold and silver during the event’s competition portion that involved about 50 students.

“As Ontario is moving into the creative age it is critical that we teach our business students to use their left and right brain to come up with creative solutions to new problems that will be facing our communities, while being environmentally friendly and socially conscious,” said Diana Prior, a business teacher at St. Roch and co-chair of the event.

As part of the contest, students are asked to create an innovative product that meets a need in society and shows respect for the environment while remaining socially conscious.

Competitors must conduct product, business, industry and consumer research for their projects. They produce a prototype and present a report containing all aspects of the business venture, including such details as production costs, promotions and competitive analysis.

Members of the business community serve as judges. The top ten ideas are presented with certificates and the top three are awarded gold, silver and bronze.
St. Roch student Michelle Mazzucca won first place for her innovation called HushFonez, an alternative to traditional headphones associated with levels of hearing loss when used to listen to loud music. She came up with the concept of earphones worn like earrings.

The product reduces the direct passage of music to the eardrum, but can still deliver sound and vibration to the listener. Second place went to St. Roch’s Vanetia R for her product called Poop Vac— a small contraption pet owners can use to clean up after their dogs while out in public. Bags used for the product seal in the waste, are biodegradable and can be flushed down a toilet.

Third place went to Matt Song, Radu Gugustea and Zal Machado, of St. Francis Xavier Secondary School in Mississauga, for their innovation called Recycling Lid. They designed an easy to open lid that is placed on blue boxes to stop garbage from flying out around the neighbourhood.

The event also included guest speakers on handling personal finances, the importance of saving and the risks of buying on credit.

Original article link at BramptonGuardian.com

In addition to St. Marguerite d’Youville Secondary School in Brampton where it began,  Holy Trinity becomes the second school to offer the Creative Advertising program in Ontario as of September 2010.

The video below was created as a promo for the program:

Planet in Focus runs an environmentally focused film festival each October  in Toronto, Myan Marcen-Gaudaur the Marketing and Outreach Officer from Planet in Focus was thrilled with the work of the Creative Advertising class. In her words “I was truly bowled over by what I saw yesterday – the astuteness, creativity and professionalism displayed by these young people was very impressive.”

In addition to Ms Marcen-Gaudaur, the presentations were received by Anthony Kalamut, the Chair and Professor from the Creative Advertising Program at Seneca College. The students received valuable feedback on their campaigns that included print ads, videos and viral marketing. Mr Kalamut has been involved with the program over the last two years, some of our students have moved Creative Advertising at d’Youville to his program at Seneca while others have gone into the Humber degree program and OCAD.  The program has also fed into areas of graphic design, journalism, film, radio & television as well as business studies.

In April this year Ms. Prior the founder of the program and Mr. Fujiwara made a presentation to the Ontario Business Educators Association conference. A number of teachers across the province are interested in what is happening at d’Youville and are anxious to look at offering the same program in their schools. Ms Prior has been asked to visit a school near Barrie to help start a program.

The Creative Advertising course offers a University level curriculum that challenges students in a different way.  As teachers we so often ask our students to be creative but don’t always teach them ‘how’ to be creative.  It is too often associated with the arts, drama, painting, music and dance.  Although these fields require creativity they are the ‘arts’.  Creativity, like critical and strategic thinking holds a strong place in business and other traditional left brain subjects.  If we don’t start having our students learn to solve problems in a creative way we will fall behind in the global market.  Creative Advertising concentrates on re-conditioning how they think and gives them the tools to think different.  After all as a if we all think the same, someone isn’t thinking!

Many students have been successful in the Grade 11 Entrepreneurship course over the past 7 years. They have looked at all aspects of a business and used their research to develop comprehensive business plans. The vision for the grade 12 course is to involve students in real business situations. The plan is to connect with local entrepreneurs through the Brampton Small Enterprise Centre and invite these people to share real business situations and challenges with our Grade 12’s. Our students would then develop plans to respond to these type of situations, following the d’Youville Entrepreneurship philosophy of making learning hands-on.

There are still places in the course which is being offered in second semester. We look forward to a new adventure.

• Click Here to Enter Your Email Address

After signing up above, please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for Teach Creativity. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription.

Teaching Resources will be available for download on each subject category’s page, found on the top-right of the site menu.