This week the Education and Entertainment team met for ten hours throughout the week with the focus to solidify and define their idea. At the end of last week, we thought we had finally consolidated our idea, but little did we know that our idea was far from being closed to our current polished idea. Our idea was to implement a website platform and app that would provide students with the resources to learn practical and specific industry skills, a virtual community to connect and meet with mentors that will help them provide guidance for their educational and career aspirations, and would also provide accreditation to from corporations so they could become employable. We thought that this was a perfect idea and started to move forward until we hit some roadblocks.

As we met in the beginning of the week, we realized that there were various issues with our idea from not having an applicable monetization model, being culturally insensitive, lacking enough value to obtain loyalty to the program from students, and so on. We took the time to focus on these issues and think of solutions on how we could resolve them. For example, we realized that by providing parents’ access to the platform and oversee their children’s activity would make our product be accepted by parents. However, we realized that we needed Professor Darwin’s advice, and so we scheduled a meeting with him on Thursday to further work and improve our idea. During, our two hour meeting, Professor Darwin made us realize that they idea the main issue we were facing is that our idea for our project did not have specific focus and was all over the place. As we discussed and addressed the different issues we were able to have a clearer mission and a more specific idea. At the end of that meeting, we had defined our mission as individualizing education. Thursday’s class, along with Dr. Isher Ahluwali’s knowledge on urbanization in India and Brad Buss’ insight on open innovation helped us to solidify and define our idea. This Saturday our engineering team attended the Cal Hacks hackathon as they focus on further developing the website platform and IOS app platform. We also had a group meeting on Saturday in which we focus on really defining and solidifying our idea. After much deliberation we were able to consolidate our idea that addresses the issues mentioned above.

Our idea is to create a robust practical curriculum that will provide and teach students the practical and industry-related skills, the website platform and app will serve as a complement to the new curriculum to provide the students with the necessary resources so they can become more employable. We want to create a curriculum that includes a group project component where the students will be focusing on solving applicable industry-related issues to provide them with exposure and experience to the work fields they are pursuing a future career in. This upcoming week we are focusing on further developing the business plan for our idea. We also have scheduled a meeting with an individual from Vizag that has knowledge and experience in the education system of Vizag.

The Education and Entertainment Group

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