News Detail
RE Business Plan Challenge
Entrepreneurship: The quintessential interdisciplinary experience
Introduction
When Luisa Guarco ’19 joined her grandfather at a retirement home in Indiana for lunch on Thanksgiving 2018, she was dismayed to observe a woman sitting nearby who struggled because of hand tremors to eat her soup. The soup continually spilled before she could lift it to her mouth. Guarco recalled thinking: There must be a way to construct a spoon that would steady the contents and help this woman. She immediately thought of the physical principles governing the gyroscopic tools she used for orientation and stability while preparing to compete in robotics. Months later, Guarco and two classmates – Khushi Shah ’19 and Makenzie Love ’19 – offered a prototype for a spoon for people with essential tremors as the central component of the annual business plan challenge that is a critical part of RE’s AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics class under faculty member Jen Nero. The team researched competing devices, analyzed the market and devised a business strategy that they pitched to entrepreneur judges in several competitions. They never took their spoon – SpoonAble – to the market, but the students considered the experience invaluable. “Each of us brought something different to the process,” Guarco said from Tufts University, where she is now a freshman studying mechanical engineering. “We really poured our hearts and souls into it.”
Introduction
When Luisa Guarco ’19 joined her grandfather at a retirement home in Indiana for lunch on Thanksgiving 2018, she was dismayed to observe a woman sitting nearby who struggled because of hand tremors to eat her soup. The soup continually spilled before she could lift it to her mouth. Guarco recalled thinking: There must be a way to construct a spoon that would steady the contents and help this woman. She immediately thought of the physical principles governing the gyroscopic tools she used for orientation and stability while preparing to compete in robotics. Months later, Guarco and two classmates – Khushi Shah ’19 and Makenzie Love ’19 – offered a prototype for a spoon for people with essential tremors as the central component of the annual business plan challenge that is a critical part of RE’s AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics class under faculty member Jen Nero. The team researched competing devices, analyzed the market and devised a business strategy that they pitched to entrepreneur judges in several competitions. They never took their spoon – SpoonAble – to the market, but the students considered the experience invaluable. “Each of us brought something different to the process,” Guarco said from Tufts University, where she is now a freshman studying mechanical engineering. “We really poured our hearts and souls into it.”
As the Chair of the Humanities Department at Ransom Everglades, I may seem like a strange choice to author a story in a magazine spread highlighting the school’s excellence in STEM – science, technology, math and engineering. I am excited to do so because it illustrates a core belief that has driven me and other faculty across all disciplines at Ransom Everglades. Equipping students to solve the most challenging problems in the world today means requiring that they let loose their creativity, work collaboratively and seek novel, multi-faceted approaches that may require stepping outside of those realms in which they are comfortable. At Ransom Everglades, “problem solving” does not mean memorizing mathematical formulas or dates in history, or filling in bubbles on a Scantron form.
It means thinking bigger and broader. It means crossing disciplines. It means tackling problems whose answers aren’t listed in some answer key in the back of the textbook. It means you can’t be just a specialist in economics, or just a mathematician, or just a writer. The challenges facing our students when they go out in the world today will require dramatic creativity, intellectual fluidity and the resilience to keep trying when they fail.
Those are skills naturally nurtured in the annual business plan challenge that has been a core part of my AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics course for more than a decade. Entrepreneurship is the quintessential interdisciplinary experience: It is the place where science collides with the social sciences, math, language skills and the arts. Students identify real problems, test hypotheses, conduct extensive research, develop evidence-based solutions and distill and communicate the essential elements of their plan through an engaging narrative and visuals.
Many of our students’ best business plan entries are anchored in STEM fields. The top two entrepreneurial efforts in the 2019 competition featured extensive engineering. They were new products our students conceived of and mapped out for creation on a 3D printer, with plenty of guidance from our robotics coach and engineering faculty member Bob DuBard. Luisa, Makenzie and Khushi wanted to help people who struggle with essential tremors, a condition that makes executing tasks like eating soup challenging and even embarrassing. The girls reviewed spoons on the market that professed to assist with this problem, and then designed what we all agree is a better one called SpoonAble.
Jen Nero
Chair of the Humanities Department
It means thinking bigger and broader. It means crossing disciplines. It means tackling problems whose answers aren’t listed in some answer key in the back of the textbook. It means you can’t be just a specialist in economics, or just a mathematician, or just a writer. The challenges facing our students when they go out in the world today will require dramatic creativity, intellectual fluidity and the resilience to keep trying when they fail.
Those are skills naturally nurtured in the annual business plan challenge that has been a core part of my AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics course for more than a decade. Entrepreneurship is the quintessential interdisciplinary experience: It is the place where science collides with the social sciences, math, language skills and the arts. Students identify real problems, test hypotheses, conduct extensive research, develop evidence-based solutions and distill and communicate the essential elements of their plan through an engaging narrative and visuals.
Many of our students’ best business plan entries are anchored in STEM fields. The top two entrepreneurial efforts in the 2019 competition featured extensive engineering. They were new products our students conceived of and mapped out for creation on a 3D printer, with plenty of guidance from our robotics coach and engineering faculty member Bob DuBard. Luisa, Makenzie and Khushi wanted to help people who struggle with essential tremors, a condition that makes executing tasks like eating soup challenging and even embarrassing. The girls reviewed spoons on the market that professed to assist with this problem, and then designed what we all agree is a better one called SpoonAble.
Holly Steinberg ’19 and Nicole Bremer ’19 created a reusable, removable laptop camera cover (CamBlok!) designed to protect users against cyber-mischief. Nicole, who had taken an engineering class under Mr. DuBard, constructed the thin, colorful, plastic laptop camera cover that could slide in and out of place, and the two worked together to refine the design. CamBlock! won second place in both the Teen Track of the 2019 Miami Herald Startup Pitch Competition and the Innovate SFL competition for private schools. It is always thrilling to watch students grow and flourish throughout the process of developing, implementing and presenting their business plans.
I look forward to the unveiling of the dedicated lab spaces and upgraded facilities that our new STEM Center will offer. As you may imagine, I don’t look at the STEM Center as a science building as much as an interdisciplinary opportunity center that will benefit all of our students.
I look forward to the unveiling of the dedicated lab spaces and upgraded facilities that our new STEM Center will offer. As you may imagine, I don’t look at the STEM Center as a science building as much as an interdisciplinary opportunity center that will benefit all of our students.
Jen Nero
Chair of the Humanities Department
Middle School
2045 South Bayshore Drive, Coconut Grove, FL 33133Phone: 305 250 6850
Upper School
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Founded in 1903, Ransom Everglades School is a coeducational, college preparatory day school for grades 6 - 12 located on two campuses in Coconut Grove, Florida. Ransom Everglades School produces graduates who "believe that they are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it." The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student's sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and to contribute to society.