Project | Future Millionaires Challenge

 

The Future Millionaires Challenge is a semester-based curriculum project that aims to provide the students with an insight into entrepreneurship and to develop their enterprising skills. Students are given the challenge of creating an innovative idea that could be developed further into a business. Upon completion o the coursework, students are required to develop a pitch for mock investors. On average, 90 students at Saint Stephen’s College elect to undertake the challenge each year.

 

 

Community engagement is vital to the success of this program. In 2020, the HOD developed relationships with Bond University, Jade Start and Study Gold Coast with the aim to expand the Challenge to a regional competition and to adapt the Expo for the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Each student modified their physical innovation stand, to a virtual stand on a mock “crowdfunding site”.

 

As a part of the modified challenge in 2020, students developed a campaign for a crowdfunding site ‘sscquickstarter’; a play on the popular Kickstarter. This Crowdfunding site will be promoted to the wider community for virtual investment. Top four finalists will be selected from this that will pitch to a panel of judges from the God Coast Business Community "Shark Tank" style. This will be live-streamed to our student and parent body.

 

 

Examples of some of the 2020 innovations are in the link at the bottom of this submission. It is also poignant to remember that the students spent seven weeks of this semester-based course off-campus. During this time, they developed pitches, prototyped, and developed business plans.

 

Student's projects are also entered into various community-based competitions. More recently two students won the Mayors Telstra Technology Award, for the innovation developed in the Future Millionaires Challenge, and four of my students are a finalist for the Young Change Agents,  Youth Design Challenge, for an innovation they designed during the COVID-19 off-campus learning.