What Does Making It Look Like?
Ask 100 Lowell High Entrepreneurship Students!
Elyjah Ngim (center), Marcus Nova (right) and Eva Secchiaroli (far right) pose with their teammates and the tinker toy vehicle they collaboratively built.
Lowell — Rescuing “someone” on a mountaintop is probably not how a group of 100 Lowell High School students thought they’d be spending the day when they stepped off the bus on a chilly February morning — but that’s just another trip to the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub.
This is the second time Project LEARN has collaborated with UMass Lowell’s DifferenceMaker program to organize Entrepreneurship Day, a daylong field trip as part of Wayne Taylor’s entrepreneurship course to give Lowell High students a chance to solve a hands-on design challenge at the state-of-the-art Rist DifferenceMaker Institute.
“Experiential learning is a game-changer for engaging young people and equipping them with real world skills,” said Mira Bookman, Project LEARN’s senior program director and coordinator of LHS’ DifferenceMaker initiative.
The project, funded by a grant UMass Lowell’s DifferenceMaker program was awarded from M&T, was coordinated by Project LEARN to help students develop their own business model. Through the program, student teams will pitch ideas to a panel of judges for a chance to win prizes ranging from $500 to $1,000.
Holly Lalos, director of the Rist DifferenceMaker Institute, described DifferenceMaker as a “campus-wide program that engages students in creative problem solving, innovation and entrepreneurship.” The program provides UMass Lowell students with “resources to pursue their ideas and solve problems they are passionate about.”
Lalos is eager to expand beyond UML and partner with Lowell High and Project LEARN.
“It’s important to learn entrepreneurial skills early on and build an entrepreneurial mindset that will be helpful now and in their futures,” said Lalos, “whether or not they decide to launch a start-up.”
Students began their day in groups and dove into a hands-on challenge. Their goal? Create a moving vehicle that will get a person — made of tinker toys — safely off a mountaintop in just 30 minutes.
“There was a lot of teamwork involved and I liked getting to talk to people that I didn’t really know before!” said senior Henrietta Nyandemoh.
The room filled with chatter while students collaborated to design the best vehicle. As the clock ran down, groups troubleshooted ways to get around the obstacles integrated into the challenge.
Eva Secchiaroli, a junior, noted how this challenge made her and her teammates “think outside the box.”
“We really had to practice our problem solving skills in-the-moment,” noted Secchiaroli.
Later in the afternoon, students heard from DifferenceMaker alumni groups, including Elliot Johnson and Jeremy Hilton, co-founders of NeuroLyze, and Brandon Conceicao, co-founder of Amara.
Conceicao explained that business ideas don’t just fall into your lap, “You have to go out and have all kinds of different experiences — that’s when ideas really hit you.”
“I didn’t have a blueprint, or even the steps to make my idea happen. I saw a problem and I wanted to be a part of fixing it. In the real world, you have to create those steps on your own,” Conceicao said to the students.
“It was cool getting to hear about turning a passion into a business,” said junior Marcus Nova. “I want to get this kind of experience now so I can start a company when I’m in college, too.”
A classmate of Marcus’ agreed, “I wish there were more trips like this. It gives us the ability to build up our skills and have new ideas that we may not have had before,”
Between speakers, students went on tours of the iHub’s facilities to see the on-site laboratory and offices of start-up companies. They even got a visit from Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot from UMass Lowell’s NERVE Center.
As the day came to an end, senior Elyjah Ngim reflected on the impact these partnerships have on students.
“I love going on field trips because we get to experience new things and see what life could be like after graduating from high school,” he said, gesturing to his teammates seated around him as the sun shined in through the windows of the iHub.
“Being here is like seeing Lowell and the people in it become something bigger,” Ngim continued. “All programs should do trips like this so students can see people who are really ‘making it.’”