With the company report submitted and the area heats just around the corner, yesterdays meeting was a key one. The aim of the meeting was to get the Dragons Den pitch and stand design finalised.
The meeting started off with Billy explaining what was required of the students and who was going to be going into the Dragons Den pitch. It was decided, due to their roles, Billy as MD, Tom W as Finance Director and Lily as HR Director were the 3 best suited to speak. With this, Billy, Lily and Tom W headed down to the computer room to produce a PowerPoint focusing on the top 5 points they would like to convey to the judges. The criteria states that they only have 4 minutes to fully explain their product, what they have done, what they have learnt and how they have developed as a team throughout the process, so it is a lot to fit into such a small-time slot.
The other students remained with me to decide on their stand design.
From the feedback at the last trade fair, the judges said the stand looked too much like a ‘homeware’ product than a child focused learning tool. With this, I asked the students to do some research into creative ways they could make their product link back to their objective of making learning fun.
After a little time to throw ideas around, the students decided on a ‘kids market stand’ design like the one pictured on the left.
With this decision made, the next challenge was to work out how we could source the items required to make it as colourful and realistic as the photo.
Luckily, Bradley Stoke Community School is not just a Senior school but also a Junior school. Billy and James, took the initiative to head to the Junior school with a rough drawing and list of what we needed to source. It was a random list of items with everything from a small shopping trolley to a play cash register and stuffed animals to link with our Phonic Farm characters.
Once Billy and James got to the Junior school, they managed to catch the headteacher who was more than willing to help them out. She had everything they needed – even the shopping trolley! She also had a perfect unit, which is very similar to the one in the image, which would become their ‘stand’. It is split into 8 and has baskets in each box, the students quickly used this as inspiration to have each of their 7 pick n mix items in a box making it an interactive buying experience for the customer.
There is still a lot of work to bring the stand together with various labels needing to be produced from identifying which item is in which box and the 3 steps of the process. Some items also still need to be sourced such as a whiteboard for prices and bunting to place between our two roller banners.
Without sounding bias, I think this stand design has a lot of potential. It is colourful, creative and aligns with the student’s vision of making a child friendly product which helps make learning fun. It will be interesting to see how the judges take it, especially now as it is so far from the design we presented at the last trade fair.
Wish them luck!