This week the Education and Entertainment group met up multiple times to provide the insight we received from any interviews any of us conducted and to consolidate our ideas. We also set up a meeting with Professor Darwin on Tuesdaymorning and so we also discussed which questions we would ask him. We were hoping to ask him about his experiences with opening a school in Vizag including all of the challenges he faced. We also wanted to share our ideas with them and see how feasible he thought they would be. Finally, we set up several meeting times this week and decided to split up into groups to research use cases of any of our ideas. While we want to create something new, we’re hoping the use cases can highlight the feasibility of our prototype.

One of the interviews that we conducted this week was with a volunteer at an education non-profit and from her, we were able to understand the issues within the education system today. A major issue she highlighted was the lack of resources for the students, especially in terms of books and technology. After the interview with her, we also realized an important factor that we needed to take into consideration, which was how implementable our prototype will be. We realized that we need to ensure that there is minimal maintenance for the prototype and the current infrastructure will be able to support it. She mentioned an ambitious project undertaken by Prime Minister Modi to increase access to toilets for the public by creating public restrooms that could be used for free. While this might be feasible in other countries and is a novel solution to the problem, in India the project has not been maintained and a lot of the restrooms are in extremely bad conditions, therefore adding to, not alleviating the problem.

Some use cases that we identified within the thread of our idea to create a mentoring program include YEAH (Young Entrepreneurs At Haas) which allows high school students to be mentored by current undergraduates. This provides them with an insight of the business world and also life at Cal. Other use cases for open innovation within education include Coursera and edX, which let people from around the world take free online courses offered by prestigious institutions. This week we will be conducting more interviews as well as our own research regarding the structure of the education system and ways in which we can disrupt it.

The Education and Entertainment Group

Itzel Martinez, Arshad Ali Abdul, Divya Suri, Julio Dominguez, Rosie Serrato