May 8, 2019

Entrepreneurship is an intensely intellectual and extremely social journey of understanding a problem and solving it in a resourceful manner for people. Entrepreneurship is not just writing a business plan or presenting it to a group of grown-ups to win a medal or a small check.

Entrepreneurship coaching, even for grown-ups, which over-emphasizes the theatrics of a stage performance in a pitch competition puts the cart before the horse. There is a need for public speaking skills, but at a later stage. Entrepreneurship usually starts with being mindful in research, a lot of listening, and rolling up one’s sleeves in search of the best way to make a customer delighted, or just to make the customer breathe a little easier.

The way AlligatorZone Academy’s summer camp curriculum is designed and delivered is therefore different from what parents might typically see at an entrepreneurship boot-camp for children and teens.

In AlligatorZone Academy’s summer camp, we help children and teens (ages 10–15) with introspection so that they figure out what they would like to pursue as a project over the next year or so. Then we provide them with mental models and frameworks to making decisions on various aspects of taking their product to the market, and letting the market decide if their work deserves recognition with actual sales. Participants in the summer camp will use real-world productivity tools just like any startup founder, and learn to think like startup founders, without using jargon. The focus is on first principles of entrepreneurship so that the kids and teens really grasp the core concepts and use them as building blocks of life-skills that will stand them in good stead no matter what their future career and calling. We steer the children, with the support of their respective families, towards the steps needed to take an idea and make a product out of it, working alongside them step-by-step with a compressed launch-program to help them get their project off the ground in the real world.

There are no plans for pitch competitions, no award ceremonies and no participation medals. Just a close-knit community of students who help one another out, and have a blast just being their creative selves, without pressure.

The kids leave AlligatorZone’s workshops with a sense of quiet confidence and pride about a body of work that they started from concept, and depending on the time on hand, progressed sufficiently forward to a stage of creation and validation in the real world. After the workshop, the kids and teens may continue to build in order to differentiate themselves as a distinctive personal brand.

This summer, AlligatorZone is formalizing a layer of support after the summer camp. AlligatorZone will continue to provide the students with a low-maintenance yet highly effective subscription plan to provide guidance to the children and teens with the help of a supportive community, should they wish to continue on their entrepreneurial education and journey.

We hope you will enroll your child at AlligatorZone Academy’s summer enrichment program (https://AlligatorZone.org/Summer)

We also hope that you will become a premium subscriber and join our community (https://AlligatorZone.org/Premium).

Further, parents may also consider taking their children to attend our free public AlligatorZone events (https://AlligatorZone.org/Attend). Read this blog post about why those events are important. (http://bit.ly/2Wvz51d).

April 4, 2019

A summer camp on skills in entrepreneurship for kids and teens must transcend the cliched business plan, pitch parties and participation trophies. AlligatorZone Academy’s summer camp and after-school enrichment programs aim for a real-world take on imparting startup skills to young minds.

Both 4th graders were good at baking, they had told me. They want to sell baked delicacies. However, in this week’s class, they were simply out of ideas on what to name their bakery. These kids are part of an after-school program that we are piloting to help late-elementary and middle-school students create something of value and make a difference in their world. An outcome of this pilot is going to be the design of a fun and educational workshop to help kids understand startup skills that will serve them in life, no matter what their calling.

School projects are usually done to earn a grade from a teacher. Students sharpen their focus on understanding what is expected of them from the teacher, and they learn to just meet or maybe exceed those expectations. School projects often lie undiscovered, tucked away in notebooks. If they are lucky the students’ projects may get to see the outside world in a parent-conference, or in an exhibition put together by the school, with tri-fold display boards and bright eyed kids standing proudly explaining their projects to distracted parents politely saying “Great job!” before rushing back to work.

Let’s look at a different possibility. What if the child’s project is steered by real entrepreneurs in such a way that it is readied for the market, allowing real customers to support it with their wallets?

Going back to the story of the two girls and the bakery project, one of the exercises in taking their work to the market was trying to come up with a memorable name for their bakery. We went through a few exercises to help them think of names for their bakery. The one thing I do not do as the coach, is to provide them with names to pick from. As a coach my responsibility is to help the students find the joy of discovery, and not deny it to them by spoon-feeding them. I could see the kids becoming quite frustrated because the names they thought of were already taken and could have been confused with random businesses such as a building supplies company. I left them alone to think about it, while I went about attending to other kids in the program.

Wouldn’t the Fedex business plan have earned an A+ if it had been tested out in the real world instead of being graded as a theoretical paper?

As we were about the wrap up the afternoon’s session, both the kids ran up to me in excitement and somewhat breathlessly said “We think we have a name”. It was a catchy name. It was something they had come up with, and I could sense not just their relief, but also their renewed enthusiasm and sense of ownership for their whole project.

Can education for school-age students tap into the joys of discovery through entrepreneurial decision making and be allowed to be scored by the validation of delighted customers instead of grades being handed at school? Wouldn’t the Fedex business plan have earned an A+ if it had been tested out in the real world instead of being graded as a theoretical paper that never left the classroom?

The Summer Camp that we are designing for 2019 is aimed at helping parents and families with tools to encourage their kids to take their creations to the real world while trying to make a difference. That means, the kids will not only have to pick projects that they like, but also something that their world outside would care deeply about, and want it enough to be willing to pay for their creations.

The summer camp for 2019 in Tampa Bay will be held at the inspirational Entrepreneur Collaborative Center in Ybor City in Tampa, Florida, a very dynamic group that has been extremely supportive of AlligatorZone’s work in connecting kids with the world of startups to build channels and communities of learning.

Click here for details of the summer camp, called AlligatorZone Academy’s Summer Workshop on Startup Skills for Kids, or enroll your child (ages 10–15) here. The summer camps help defray some of the costs of the free public event-programs by AlligatorZone.org.

The author is entrepreneur and educator Ramesh Sambasivan. principal designer at design and innovation firm SiliconGlades, creating learning experiences and environments for companies and communities.

July 6, 2018

Observations from running a kids’ summer workshop on entrepreneurial-mindset.

Last week, I had the privilege of spending some time with kids of ages 11–14 while running a special workshop series, being designed as a premium alternative-learning launchpad for kids to begin to understand how entrepreneurs think. These workshops are held under the banner of AlligatorZone Academy, to support the free public event-program AlligatorZone®, where kids meet cool startups.

This series of workshops is being designed starting with a big, blank canvas, for families who want to invest in enriched learning experiences despite it being a ‘summer workshop’. We draw from a wide variety of public resources and let the kids have fun as they learn and embark on their own voyage of discovery, if they feel sufficiently motivated. Some leave with an initiative that they can pursue on their own, long after summer is over.

Here are three of the many interesting lessons we learned during last week’s workshop with the kids:

Kids pick up jargon effortlessly.

I am not sure if it is because they want to sound adult-like, or it is because they love labeling things, kids seem to take to jargon very quickly. We deliberately strive to avoid all business jargon. I think that jargon has the life-span of fads, and what they learn may become outdated by the time these kids enter the world of work.

Jargon has the life-span of fads

We would rather use the time with the kids to help them observe the world around them and absorb timeless lessons they can always remember, apply, and talk about, with the help of more contemporary jargon keeping with the times when they get into a career or when they find a calling — if the use of jargon will help them. Our effort to steer clear of business jargon, however, remains a work-in-progress. At last summer’s workshop, I had inadvertently used the word ‘traction’, and found that within minutes the kids were generously using the word, though it was in the right context. Still, it felt like they lost a piece of their child-like quality when they resorted to using business jargon instead of plain talk. Kids pick up jargon effortlessly. That is no reason to teach them business jargon.

Kids love good stories — even stories on concepts in commerce.

Kids love stories.

The workshops are designed to provide an entertaining and enlightening view of the world of business and commerce. One of the goals was to pick up on some concepts in commerce and look at their real-world manifestations using examples as part of story-telling. We refer to them as CaseStories™. We learned that kids simply love good stories — even stories on concepts in commerce.

Kids know media.

Through four years of observing kids interact with startup founders at AlligatorZone’s free public events, I have learned quite a bit about the next generation of consumers and decision-makers. Being native to the digital world, the kids are a natural with the use of modern tools made possible by the mobile web. They know how to empower themselves by finding their audience.

However, interacting with them during the workshop and learning about what excited them was eye-opening indeed. For instance, kids can rattle off names of YouTubers and can articulate why they like or dislike some of them. Another example is the positioning of common-place activities as an art-form for a digitally native medium and audience. Pen-tapping is now a marketable skill, I learned.

Pen-tapping is an art-form!

Kids understand how to build an audience for it online, and perhaps have even made it into a branded art form that wins them accolades. Back when I was in middle school, for pen-tapping and desk-drumming, all I won was a resounding slap from a very strict school teacher.

These are just three highlights from an exhilarating workshop that had kids bubbling with energy and enthusiasm over matters of commerce and entrepreneurship.

Parents and educators can leverage certain strengths in children to get them inspired efficiently.

Parents and educators can leverage these traits observed in kids by engaging them in entrepreneurial thinking through topics and matters that interest them. It would make education more efficient if we could find paths of least resistance to get kids inspired about seeking solutions and opportunities to make the world better.

We are now planning another set of such workshops in Silicon Valley this month. I believe that whatever the kids work on or play with in their early school years with an entrepreneurial mindset, they will derive compounded benefits if they can find something aligned with their interests, making it easier for them to stick with it or find patterns in their varying pursuits during their growing years.

After all, it’s about eventually connecting these dots to a fulfilling and rewarding calling, and somewhere early along the way — finding traction.

The author Ramesh Sambasivan is a designer and cofounder of AlligatorZone.org, where kids meet cool startups. Click here to learn more more about AlligatorZone’s upcoming workshops for kids, being planned in SiliconValley for this summer. Share this essay with family-friends, teachers and tutors who have school-age kids under their care and supervision.