The Eastern Region office has had their director’s hat on these past few weeks and we can now unveil our Enterprise Week 2008 in the Eastern Region DVD!
The dvd will hopefully be on the website by the end of next week so watch this space!
Things have been pretty exciting at Make Your Mark Challenge Head Quarters this week, not only have we had some chocolate digestives to sustain us through the week (pretty exciting in itself if you ask me!) but I have been gathering news from around the country about what our national finalists from the Challenge 2008 have been up to and it’s AMAZING!!
So make yourself a cuppa, grab a choccie biccie and prepared to be amazed by what our teams have achieved so far….
Cedar Mount High School came second in the 14-16 category with their idea to set up ‘Cedar Mount Gorton Amateur Boxing Club’ and hey presto thanks to a grant from the Youth Opportunity Funding Grant they open this weekend! The boxing ring is in place and they are in talks with a well known boxer to come along and cut the tape…hope it goes well Cedar Mount, we look forward to seeing all the news cuttings!
Highcliffe School came third in the 16-19 category with Scan and Play a swipe card which builds up points as you take part in sporting activities. They have not stopped developing their idea since they won their prize and are in positive discussions with various people to receive funding to get their idea up and running.
John Hampden Grammar School came first in the 16-19 category with their idea ‘True London Tours’ which will train homeless people to provide an Olympic tour service in London. The team are off to meet their local homeless charity The Wycombe Winter Night shelter to find out more about working with the homeless which will help them with their business idea…good idea guys it’s always useful to do some research before launching your business.
Wheatley Park School came second in the 16-19 category with their idea for Value Bands, a range of seven collectable wristbands based upon the seven Olympic and Paralympic Values. The team are developing their idea further with the help of a professional business advisor and are in the process of arranging a meeting with Nick Fuller, Head of Education at the Organising Committee for the London Olympic Games (LOCOG).
WOW…they certainly are an enterprising bunch! Watch this space to see what they do next…
if you want to find out more about what the other teams did then check out the very cool map that our friends at LOCOG have done.
I was a buddy yesterday at my first ever Make Your Mark Challenge Final and must say I absolutely loved it, great job all round Tori and team!
The creativity, effort and professionalism of the students was so impressive particularly during the pitching session. If there were nerves to contend with they certainly hid them well - the 10 groups in the 16-19 category delivered faultless presentations to the panel of judges that would give any Dragons Den contestant a run for their money!
Of course I do have a little soft spot for my lovely team from Matthew Arnold School in Oxford, who came up with the idea for The Olympian, a magazine to promote the Olympic values and raise interest in the Games. They had the daunting task of pitching first to the panel of judges, an audience of fellow challengers AND invited guests, and they certainly took it in their stride. Holly even managed to raise a giggle from the audience.
The Matthew Arnold crew sadly didn’t win a prize on the day, although they should feel darn proud to have got down to the final 10 of a competition which involved 57,000 people across the UK - proving they’re some of very best young enterprising thinkers in the entire country – well done to all the finalists!
I had my trusty Disgo on hand throughout the day, check out what the Matthew Arnold team had to say after their pitch Holly and Sameena, Jack, Mike
Even though I had only met them that day, I couldn’t help feeling pride when my buddy team Wheatley Park School came second in the Challenge - woo hoo! Their ‘value bands’ must have caught the judges’ imagination and I had my eye on their prototype ‘rainbow’ bands (hand made by the girls in the team!). I will def be collecting them when they no doubt hit the shelves in 2012!!
The team and their winning wristbands:
The team receive their prize from Matt Littler and Darren Jeffries!:
Their thoughts on winning 2nd prize:
Hooray!
Mikey Naylor, from Selby High School, had a great time this week when he and nine of his mates went to visit Xing, a smoothie company in Hull.
Having launched a competition to ask students to come up with a great name for a brand new smoothie, Mikey put forward the winning idea - ‘Yum yum, healthy tum’ giving him and his friends the chance to spend a day with the smoothie entrepreneurs.
Not only were the team able to ask questions about the company and how it all started they also got the chance to whiz up their very own tasty treats – our tummies are rumbling at the thought!
To add a further competitive element to the day, Xing asked the students to split into three groups and come up with new smoothie ideas, using their own ingredients. They were then asked to cost the products and put together a marketing plan as if it were their own business.
Xing has agreed to put each smoothie on sale for a day where they will find out for real which smoothie was the most popular and which one made the most money.
What a fantastic idea – watch this space for the results!
Well, what a month and more importantly what a CHALLENGE - our biggest and best ever!
Special congratulations have to go to Crawshaw School in Leeds and Holy Trinity Senior School in Halifax for their fantastic efforts in reaching the Make Your Mark Challenge national finals.
The competition was fierce and although the schools didn’t take the title of national Make Your Mark Challenge winner they certainly proved that enterprise is alive and kicking in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
Both schools were faced with a ‘surprise challenge’ during the final on Tuesday 9 December to produce a radio advertisement that would support their enterprising idea. The judges were completely bowled over and gave special mention to the fact that Crawshaw and Holy Trinity met with the strict deadlines and maintained their professionalism – even when the judges purposely gave every team involved a grilling!
Fending off tough competition from more than 56,000 students is something to be very, very proud of and to get to the final stages of the UK’s largest enterprise challenge is certainly something that we would want on our CV – you never know, Sir Alan Sugar could come knocking on the back of a great idea.
So a BIG round of applause to all the students who took part in this year’s Make Your Mark Challenge, we know it takes a great deal of time and effort to come up with the great ideas that were submitted but we hope that you all enjoyed it and learnt that it can be very rewarding to use your enterprising ideas to turn a business into reality.
From what we have heard since the Challenge (we have our spies!) the teams were buzzing on the train, all the way back from London – and so you should be guys, well done.
Now come on Yorkshire and Humber let’s get our thinking caps on ready for next year’s Challenge – and let’s make sure we have even more success to celebrate in 2009!
Well…what a day! Yesterday saw 21 teams from schools across the UK meet at Kings Place, London to decide once and for all ‘who is the top banana?’. Tori (Challenge and Club Manager) and I have been busy organising the National Final for the Make Your Mark Challenge 2008 for weeks now and the hard work payed off yesterday (even if I say so myself) the event went without the hitch and I think that was mainly down to the high standard of the fabulous contestants!!
They could show those contestants on Strictly and X factor what it means to work under pressure…what I like about Strictly and X factor is watching the performers put in so much work over the weeks and watching the hard work pay off as they improve so much, they put so much effort in to their performances and they do it all with such a short time frame and that’s what I thought was fab about the Challenge yesterday. The teams had clearly put in so much effort, had practised their presentations at every possible moment and were not phased by the short time they had to do their tasks.
And while we don’t yet know who will win the TV shows (Come on Lisa & Brendan and Alex) we do know who has won the Challenge and who has been crowned ‘top banana’ check out our website to find out who the winning teams are.
Well…I’m off to make a cup of tea this Challenge malarky has worn me out but boy has it been worth it. I had such a fantastic day yesterday and I certainly won’t forget all the great enterprising students I met in a hurry. Well done to everyone involved.
At yesterday’s Challenge final I had a cracking day buddying the eventual winners of the 14-16 category - Waldegrave School in Twickenham.
Now I could be forgiven for being biased… but I kinda knew they were going to win! Who wouldn’t want their idea which was an interactive console (a little like a Tamagochi) called ‘My Little Athlete’ which you have to feed and train!? The reaaaaaally cool thing is that you can compete with other My Little Athletes (and swimmers and cyclists) using the power of bluebooth to see who had trained the best!
In fact I was so confident they were going to win I recorded a post on the Challenge website saying who I thought would be the Top Banana, which you can watch it here.
So well done the girls and the school and the Richmond EBP and me for buddying them!
Yesterday I attended the Make Your Mark Challenge finals for the third time running but was again blown away by the creativity, confidence and enthusiasm of the finalists. My job was to brief Matt Littler and Darren Jeffries (TV presenters and actors, who made their name in Hollyoaks) on their roles as comperes for the pitching stage and the awards ceremony, although I spent more time fighting back the crowds of screaming girls who seemed quite excited to see them there! I was with Darren when he introduced the 14-16 year old groups to come and pitch on stage and he did a fab job of putting them at ease and making it a real occasion.
The pitches themselves were amazing - they included a ‘parkour’ or ‘free running’ roll on to the stage, rap, singing, blind folds, props and some very good answers to some difficult questions from the judges. One team - whose idea was to set up a boxing academy for the community - were asked ‘why boxing, isn’t that contentious?’. In response they confidently told us that angling was more dangerous than boxing. So I might pack my rod away and replace it with a pair of boxing gloves…
One of my favourite ideas was ‘Tile with Style’ from Brannel School in Cornwall - a company which sells clay tiles which people personalise and they are then placed on the ground around the Olympic Stadium. Half the money raised through the sale of the tiles will go to the Olympic Games. The judges made the point that it might be better to do it online rather than send out tiles in the post which would be expensive. I hope the team progresses their idea as it has real potential.
Well done to everyone who took part!
Ok I’m going a little bit blog crazy today but like a proud buddy (adpotive mother) I had to share this little nugget of joy.
Unbeknown to my team, in the next half hour of this interview they would be anounced the winners of the 16-19 category of the Make Your Mark Challenge. Having just pitched in front of a panel of fierce judges (I must say I was scared) and seeing the standard of the other teams they were feeling aprehensive but optimistic. What a great bunch they were and I’m really pleased they won.
Will we see their idea up and running soon? Very possibly, as London Metropolitain University also very kindly offered some business masterclasses and hard cash to send them on their way. Their comapny ‘True London Tours’ will train homeless people to provide tours around London during the Olympics, so look out for them at 2012!
Scan & Play from Highcliffe School in Devon also did very well coming third in the same category with their social networking site to encourage young people to participate in sport by awarding points every time they participate in a sport.
Good Luck and Well done guys! x
So my group John Hampden Grammar School have just finished recording their radio ad. Nerves were running high while we were kept waiting but I think they managed to nail it! This was after great advice from Radioville’s Ian Mactivish to keep their ad as simple as poss. We were kept very amused while he demonstrated to us examples of good and bad radio ads - some more hilarious than others. Among the funniest ad was one voiced by Jimmy Nail and another by Chris Morris which involved him calling random public phone boxes!
After all that excitement we’re just finishing up our lunch before we go into the Main Hall to watch everyone’s pitching. Looking forward to it. Good luck guys!
Here I am at the Make Your Mark Challenge national final. What a buzz there is! I am lucky enough to be the ‘buddy’ of Wheatley Park School in the 16-19 category. Their rather marvellous idea is for ‘value bands’, where people try to collect Olympic-themed wristbands and trade them to win tickets to the Olympics…awesome! They are a confident bunch and I asked them how they are feeling…
Will they be crowned the top banana? Come back later to find out!
What do you get if you cross a banana costume (designed by Leeds College Art & Design) two hundred bananas (donated by International Produce) and more than 300 students from Pontefract New College and Park Lane College Leeds?
A great start to Enterprise Week and the launch of the Make Your Mark Challenge of course. You will see from the podcast below that the students really got into the spirit of things and if you look closely there are a few ‘life sized’ bananas around too!
We had a great day and the students have come up with some fantastic ideas in response to the Challenge. In fact, we are quietly confident that we could retain our position as the national winning region this year – come on Yorkshire and Humber!
The Challenge team have been eagerly watching as challenge entries have started to come in. There are some great ideas coming in and it will be very interesting to see which ideas get through to the regional finals next week.
We have also been receiving quotes, photos and general feedback from teachers and students alike and by all accounts it sounds like Challenge day was a great success.
Check out our flickr site where we are uploading all the great pictures we are getting of Make Your Mark Challengers.
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