DeLorean Project in Full Swing - Glasshouse Christian College

For those that aren’t aware of the DeLorean Project’s purpose, it’s to give our Year 10’s the opportunity to implicitly develop the enterprise skills that will be required for success in any career pathway. As you may or may not be aware, more and more employers are worrying less about employees being technically or academically qualified as knowledge and technical skills can be learned on the job. Companies are even creating their own ‘Corporate Universities’ to do this. What employers struggle with is teaching employees how to be better communicators, how to collaborate effectively in a team, how to creatively and critically problem solve a challenging situation, how to effectively reflect on performance, and how to be resilient enough to overcome failure. There is a growing gap between what is needed in the workplace regarding these enterprising skills and what employees have the capacity to contribute in these areas, especially young employees.

The DeLorean Project gives students the opportunity to develop these important skills through the process of actioning an idea that solves a problem in their world. We spent Term 1 providing students with a framework to take an idea and action it, making it into something tangible for the world to experience. Our program tagline is “Think, Create, Share”. Think of a problem to solve, create a solution, and share it with the world to see what they think, then using the feedback received, make the idea/solution better. It’s not an easy process, but it is an extremely valuable one. Students must be creative, they must learn to communicate their idea really effectively in a short amount of time, they must learn to prototype and test their assumptions about their idea/solution and they must be resilient enough to accept feedback when it isn’t as positive as they had hoped. In a nutshell, this process is called the ‘Lean Startup’. If you haven’t read the book by Eric Ries, it should be added to your reading list. So what did we do in Term 1 and what is coming up in Term 2?

Term 1 had 3 major themes. Understanding self and others with regards to patterns of behaviour, identifying and understanding problems that need to be solved, and learning how to go about creating effective solutions to problems.

The IDEA framework is a brilliant resource that helps us identify our own patterns of behaviour and therefore hopefully better understand ourselves and how we perform in certain situations, especially ones that are stressful and high pressure. We can also better understand others through this framework and that leads to effective collaboration within teams. The 4 major themes within this framework are:

1. How do you perceive and receive information? Do you see the big picture or the details more easily?

2. How do you make decisions? Is it based more on the task at hand or the people involved?

3. Where do you get your energy from?

4. How do you take action? Do you tend to be very structured or do you go more with the flow?

Communication is also an integral part of the IDEA framework and our “4 P’s of communication” is probably some of the most important learning that a person can experience. For me, this piece of learning has been the most significant in my 20 years as an educator. Understanding the nuance of conversation and that no matter who you might be speaking to, every conversation should start with people and end with a plan is a game changer with regard to becoming a better communicator. The nuance is in how long you spend at each ‘P’ depending on how well you know and understand the person or people you are communicating with.

For our ideation of problems and solutions that become our DeLorean Projects for the year, we use the Design Thinking framework. It’s a pretty standard framework for problem solving these days across most industries and if young people understand this process and can use this tool well, they will absolutely be more successful at whatever they choose to do in the future. This infographic shows how the lean startup tools fit within the Design Thinking framework.

For identifying problems around us in the areas of life we are interested in or passionate about, we used what is called the Problem Statement Canvas and we spent a lot of time thinking about the Problem Statement Canvas. Our saying to students is “Hold onto the problem really tightly, but not the solution”. If you understand the problem really really well, but understand and accept that the solution will change, this is a recipe for success. Too many times people get too focused on a solution that isn’t really working rather than focusing on the problem and allowing the solution to evolve and change over time as you better understand the problem.

In Week 6 of Term 1, we took students to Eumundi Markets to explore all of the problems that our local community has found solutions to. Students also explored the concepts of branding and marketing and what it means to validate your ideas/solutions via user/customer feedback. It was a great day and we are really hoping that as our students prototype their ideas, some will choose to attend the markets as vendors and see what the community thinks of their ideas. Please enjoy this little video of what we got up to in Term 1 in the DeLorean Project.

As we begin Term 2, we have approximately 30 teams, getting ready to launch their ideas to the world. We will hold our annual Shark Tank event over two weeks on 30 May and 7 June, where our teams will pitch their ideas to a panel of Sharks (judges), who are part of our wider innovation and business network on the Sunshine Coast. It’s an opportunity to get real feedback from experts within various industries as well as some startup money to continue to action teams’ ideas, and also mentorship from our network. It is usually a highlight of the year for students and we are always so proud and impressed at how students step up to this challenge and pitch their ideas with confidence and courage. Next week we have expert communication coach Robyn Pulman spending the morning with our DeLorean cohort, teaching them exactly what an effective 5 minute pitch looks like and how to speak with impact.

We also have gym owner Katie Culgan and Personal Trainer Shay Culgan from HIIT Nambour joining us to talk about motivation and run us through some fitness fun!

The week after we have the Managing Director of Climate Salad, Charlotte Connell with us to talk about all things climate and sustainability. It’s going to be an epic term and we can’t wait to see the learning that our DeLorean students experience!!!

Rob Steffler, Delorean Project Founder & Team Leader