Make or Break: Real World Business at DCB Enterprise Fair
Saturday morning came early for Year 10 and 11 STEM and Business Studies students this past weekend. Having spent many a late night making last-minute preparations the previous week, students started arriving at school by 8am to do final setup of their booths, help visiting vendors set up theirs, and finish preparing the lobby and SE21 spaces to receive guests for the inaugural, student-led DCB Enterprise Fair.
Over the past four weeks, DCB’s Year 10 STEM and Business Studies students have been preparing products for sale, while the Year 11 STEM students have been busy organising the event itself. A massive undertaking for both year levels, all money raised will go to support future STEM and Business Studies projects at DCB, while the richness of learning opportunities that were encountered could only have been revealed in this real world environment.
Following in the footsteps of last year’s cohort, and eager to out-do them, DCB’s Year 10 students divided themselves into teams of 3-4, typically assembled with a balance of strengths in product design, marketing and finance. Teams then set about ideating, trying to settle on business ideas that would be cost and time effective, and which showed promise to yield high returns on both the micro loans they took out to fund their start-ups, as well as their investments in time and energy.
Event organization and promotion is no easy task, let alone the first time through, and the Year 11s can certainly confirm this. From finding vendors in addition to DCB student businesses, to finding event sponsors, logistics and promotion, the class of 22 students tackled the entire list over the past several weeks. Along the way, students adjusted and grew their plans based on the advice of peers, teachers, respective engaged DCB departments, and vendors and sponsors themselves, who, once signed up, became the team’s clients.
The DCB Enterprise Fair behind them, Year 10 students are now working on improving their businesses for the remaining weeks of this project, as well as on new opportunities to sell their goods. Year 11 students will now reflect upon this experience to fuel their own growth and help the next cohort take on this challenge in an ever-improving cycle of development. They will then be moving on to their own Kickstarter projects, where they can apply learning over the past two years to develop a top-tier idea they hope will get the attention of an even larger audience.
DCB and SE21 would like to thank our sponsors: Tech Kids, Procter and Gamble, Fuwah International Group and Laiwa & Ferid (Beijing) Technology Inc. for their generous support of the event, all the customers we had on the day, as well as everyone who helped make the event possible. We couldn’t have done it without you.
