Recently, Portland Metro STEM Partnership (PMSP) sat down with Wade Hopkins and Samira Farah of NE STEAM Coalition to discuss this year’s Design Hustle Academy (DHA) program, a four-month long program offered by NE STEAM Coalition in partnership with Oregon MESA, TiE Oregon Foundation and Portland Metro Metro STEAM Partnership.
In the program, students learn how to solve a problem in their community, turn those ideas into an invention, and use their inventions to become their own boss. Towards the end of the program, student's projects are presented to judges, in hopes to secure a place in the TiE Young Entrepreneurs State Competition. This year, Design Hustle Academy was thrilled to learn one of their own, Team Rapid Jacket, was selected to participate in the competition!
PMSP: Please, tell us about this year’s program and how it went!
Samira: This year specifically, we focused on entrepreneurship. Students identify “bugs” and their passions. A bug is something that bothers them throughout the day. Students create their own solutions around their “bug” thinking how an entrepreneur would. Which means surveying potential customers, creating a target, going through the whole process. Towards the end of the program, students present their projects and business ideas to judges, with the chance to qualify for state competition. So, for instance, one of the students would always feel under pressure when she wanted to create art, yet art was also her passion. She ended up creating an app around her “bug” and presented the prototype to the judges, eventually qualifying for state competition.
PMSP: What's the age group of students, and who typically mentors them through this process?
Samira: Middle and high school students. The mentors are mostly college students and people of color, as well as myself. Mentors are there to encourage, help the process along, ask questions, engage and motivate/
PMSP: What do you find the most challenging about this work?
Wade: From my perspective, because I've done a similar curriculum, when you take a student who’s had a challenging experience or two, and you ask them to be creative without guardrails, that can be really challenging, right? So some of these kinds of processes take longer to get started. And the students just need different types of support to sort of feel safe to make mistakes. Because that creative instinct continues to be overwritten by perfectionism, or a need to be correct.
Samira: I think another challenge would be, getting more kids involved. When they’re in the program, they’re very engaged, but it’s also hard to be creative. So, I think just having a good mentor, someone who can open up the conversation and inspire students.
PMSP: What are your long term goals for this program?
Wade: We hope to increase the number of young entrepreneurs. To be straightforward, in an era in which STEM is becoming a more commonly taken career pathway, we're hoping to widen that pathway for BIPOC students, creating entrepreneurs to come up with solutions to problems that we all need. That's my own personal vision.
PMSP: How do you keep students inspired and motivated throughout the process?
Samira: You don't really know what they're going through on a day to day basis, so just maintaining a personal relationship with them is important so they feel safe. I think just learning about where they come from, and then going from there and being a support in any way that you can. Also, having people who look like them to be like their mentors is super important.
Wade: Part of the NE STEAM Coalition response is getting our connectors, our term for mentors, trained in helping them in relational approach when we're in these classes, not necessarily as teachers, but as pure normals, or peers with the students that are in these classes. One of those tools we have is generative dialogue, which is holding conversations at the end of every class to openly analyze and co-create what's going to happen in the next class. Generative dialogue is a commonly known teaching technique that is seldom executed, but through which our connectors, like Samira, have this great opportunity to foster these kinds of conversations. And so the more the student gets to direct and understand that they play a valid role in the process they're in, they start to see themselves, and it impacts their STEM identity formation and pathways open up.
PMSP: It sounds like the process is just as valuable as the end result?
Samira: So there's a lot that goes into the process and it's kind of like they're looking at it from a CEO standpoint. They’re learning the marketing side of things such as deciding what social media they want to use, revenue advertisements, gathering information, sending out surveys, thinking outside the box and problem solving.
PMSP: Besides creating young entrepreneurs, tell us about the successes students have had with their inventions!
Samira: Team Rapid Jacket from DHA was one of 12 finalists selected to participate in the TYE State Competition. It was a sort of backpack that turned into a jacket. The jacket was made out of waterproof material and could be used for students walking home in the rain, for camping, or even the unhoused community. So that was pretty exciting to find out they qualified at the state level.
Aris from Team Rapid Jacket presenting at last month’s TYE State Competition
PMSP: What plans do you have for the next run of DHA?
Wade: Basically, omicron came in and messed up everybody's plans last fall, and we’re reaching a point where if we can't do this work face to face, would we do it? As it stands, students are not looking for enrichment activities online. So we’re planning on running micro versions of DHA that run in a few pulses, like four sessions, a mini summer camp of sorts throughout the summer in some of the surrounding schools.
Thank you Samira and Wade for taking the to share all the good work NE Coalition is doing with and for BIPOC students in the STEM community, and congrats on making it to the state competition!
Click on the image below to watch Team Rapid Jacket’s full pitch presentation at TYE!
Special thanks to Boeing for being proud sponsor of Design Hustle Academy. Boeing seeks to graduate more students ready to enter aerospace and advanced manufacturing careers and STEM-focused post-secondary education, with a special emphasis on students of color and others from communities typically underrepresented in STEM fields.