Free Activity: Prototyping Challenge
This activity will get students straight into generating solutions for a user or client’s problems by creating a prototype.
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VentureLab Champion Tina Belden encourages creativity in the classroom
Using VentureLab curriculum has allowed Tina’s students to take on an essential entrepreneurial belief: “I can be as creative as I want and it’s not wrong.”
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Making Failure a Tool for Discovery
How do you speak to your children and students about failure? Do you create an environment and engage in a dialogue with your children where failure is a tool for discovery? At VentureLab, we’ve spoken with students about how they perceive failure. In doing so, students learn that failure has a vocabulary all its own,…
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Free Resource: This Is Not…
This activity is an improvisation game where students take an ordinary object and transform it into ANYTHING they can think of, either real or imaginary.
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How to Build Grit In Youth
Resilience and Perseverance Grit is an essential element of the entrepreneurial mindset. It has two parts. One is resilience, a positive response to failure or adversity. The other is perseverance, a tendency to maintain interest and stay on task in the face of obstacles. Grit means not enabling a pattern or habit of abandoning tasks just for the…
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Start Them Young
In these recent posts in which I’ve offered tips on raising entrepreneurial girls, I’ve suggested ways to foster their curiosity, encourage girls to remain idealistic (and to use that idealism to push themselves creatively), and to embrace and learn from failure. Here I look at an important tip for raising an entrepreneurial girl: start quite…
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Help Them “Scamper” To Creativity
In these last few posts, I’ve been providing a series of tips for raising entrepreneurial girls. So far, these have included letting them embrace failure, helping them unleash their creativity, harvesting their idealism and letting them get messy as they get creative and discover what makes things tick. This next tip for raising entrepreneurial girls…
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Channel Their Idealism
I’ve been outlining tips for raising entrepreneurial girls, talking about letting them unleash their curiosity, not minding getting dirty, and embracing and learning from failure. We need, too, to let them live in idealism—the kind that propels them to continue to want to change, to do good in the world. We too often associate entrepreneurship…
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Let Them Appreciate Failure
In this series of blog posts, I’m providing tips on raising entrepreneurial girls. Such tips include letting girls develop their curiosity and also to get messy (creativity is messy, after all). Here, I look at another important tip for raising an entrepreneurial girl: letting her appreciate and learn from failure. It starts at the home….
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The Lessons Of A Lemonade Stand
The Story of National Lemonade Day Little girls are naturally imaginative and industrious. In class or at home, learning that they can make their ideas a reality sparks their motivation. With a bit of encouragement, they will find ways to be productive, leading to a lifetime foundation of self direction and self confidence. After entrepreneur…
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Girls Can Become Entrepreneurs Before They Even Start School
Most 5-year-olds have not yet been to school, and don’t yet understand what it is to make a failing grade. What better time to introduce them to the entrepreneurial skill of learning from successive failures? Testing, trying, failing, rethinking, adjusting, failing again, wisely—this cycle is designed into Entrepreneurship 101 for 5- to 7-year-olds. We ensure…
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Let Children Grow By Following Their Interests
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Pablo Picasso once said. Too often, children lose the confidence to follow their interests because of an educational system that is test-obsessed and focused on correct answers instead of creative problem-solving. The loss can be gradual, subtle and…
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Encourage Girls to Identify Problems and Find Soultions
For young girls, every day is a new adventure of first-time experiences, discovering boundaries along the way. The entrepreneurial twist is to encourage girls to identify their problems and think about solutions to frustrations, focusing and improving on their ideas, with just enough guidance and assistance from grown-ups. When I teach 5-year-olds, I’m continually struck…
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Empowering Girls in Science through Art and Design Integration
Learn how art and design are being used as powerful tools to encourage more girls to pursue science. This innovative approach combines creativity with scientific learning, aiming to create a more inclusive and appealing environment in STEM fields.
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Help Girls to Learn How Creative STEAM Can Be
Discover how VentureLab encourages girls to embrace the STEM fields by showcasing the inherent creativity in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (eSTEAM). Learn about the transformative experiences and educational approaches that can guide more girls towards innovative eSTEAM careers.
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A Change in Perspective Can Develop Children’s Curiosity
In this series of posts, I’ve been outlining seven strategies that I’ve uncovered—through my work, and through the insights explored by Frans Johannson in his book The Medici Effect that encourage the curious child to embark on a quest of discovery. In the last few posts, I looked at the need to reawaken a drive in children,…
