St Mary's i3 Program 2024
Intro
One of my aims for 2024 was to give back to the community and to do more mentoring. In 2023 I was chatting with former colleague and friend Johan Grant about the mentoring he had been doing with St Mary’s and I thought this would be something I’d like to do in 2024. As it turns out, Kristy Stewart who I’ve known for many years is involved in the running of the program and we caught up at the end of 2023 and added me to the list of mentors for 2024.
Overview
The i3 Program at St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School is one of their Flagship Programs. It is a compulsory, year-long program where Year 10 students work in teams alongside industry mentors to develop a functional app, website or other digital solution to solve one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Through a variety of inquiry and project-based activities, teams are required to produce a range of deliverables before participating in the program’s end-of-year Live Pitch Showcase, where they pitch their solution to a panel of judges in a ‘Shark Tank’ environment.
It has been highly successful and recently was given a ringing endorsement and was recognised by the School Curriculum and Standards Authority (SCSA) as a School-Developed Endorsed Program.
Mentoring
Mentoring at a high level is a combination of 4 onsite days with the students and collaboration via Teams throughout the year. Students are broken into teams of 4 with both a student mentor from year 11 and an industry mentor such as me
Each of the days in a term are, as always, a packed room with lots of discussion and energy
The day’s generally commenced with students reconnecting with both student and industry mentors like myself and reviewing their progress. Teams then delved into the required objectives for the day. For example, during the Term 2 day, they were learning how to prioritise features and validate assumptions (Minimum Viable Product), before engaging in pitch feedback sessions to refine their communication skills and value propositions. Finally, they explored creativity through design thinking, fostering a culture of experimentation and divergent thinking via Crazy 8s and Figma.
The final day is during Term 4 and each team sets up a booth to showcase their solution to other students from year 9 who put in a student vote on the best solution. Additionally, each team pitches their idea judges who give feedback and ask the students questions on their solution, their ideas and how it solves the challenge they’ve selected or could be improved.
The day concludes with the top teams giving another pitch before a winning team is selected. All in all, it’s a great program and great to be a part of.
What’s Next
I really enjoyed working with the students this year and will be back in 2025. I think there is room for further industry engagement and potentially for some of the ideas to be pitched to investors to take the students work from MVP and initial pitch to something commercially available.
About
See my LinkedIn profile for more information about me or reach out via the links below or in the side bar.
