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Discovery is one of SSE’s signature programs, designed to help students and teams develop sought-after skills in creativity, design thinking, and entrepreneurship. Participants learn and apply skills to work through real-world problems, and collaborate to ideate, innovate, pivot, and scale solutions for impact.
Discovery encourages participants to reflect on their learnings and embrace new ideas, and culminates in their pitching their innovations and solutions to an expert panel. It’s fun, it’s ambitious, and opens participants up to a world of possibility and a future filled with opportunity.
Gary Hansen, Principal of Trangie Central School in regional NSW, spearheaded the roll-out of Discovery in his school after taking part in SSE’s Entrepreneurial Educators Program.
“I saw the impact that a creative mindset had across all of my teaching, so I was motivated and inspired to help develop the same innovative attitude in my students.”
“We are time-poor at school,” explained Science and STEM Teacher at Hoxton Park High School in Sydney’s west, Wendy Huynh, highlighting the need for innovation education while acknowledging most schools’ ongoing resource limitations, “so [programs like] this help us a lot.”
Mr Hansen was emphatic about the need for future skills education. “In regional towns such as ours,” he said, “it has never been more important
[than now] to ensure we support young people with transferrable life skills that help them to pursue whatever career path they decide, and build their resilience for the future.”
From little things, big things grow! One Trangie student group’s premium ‘coffee caddy’ solution was borne fromobserving teachers struggling to carry large numbers of coffee cups from the local café back to their workplace and had already netted over $1,500in pre-orders prior to launch.
Likewise, SSE Training Facilitator Dr. Jayde Cahir was energised by the Hoxton Park cohort, noting that “[s]tudents have already submitted lots of creative ideas and innovative solutions for sustainable services, apps to support everyday conveniences, and unique products and fashion items that respond to the young adult market.”
“Their ideas are typical of the innovative design thinking that comes so naturally to teenagers when they are given an opportunity to develop and showcase their own ideas and solutions, which is ultimately what makes Discovery such a unique and wonderful experience.”
344
participants
82%
likely/highly likely to apply their new skills in the future
