Social Entrepreneurship Program: Passion to Action

Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California

The Challenge:

Young female leaders at Castilleja School in Palo Alto set out to solve issues they identified within their own communities. Combining their passions and abilities together, these student leaders created meaningful solutions through an entrepreneurial process.

The Process:

WEEK-LONG DESIGN THINKING IMMERSION

The entire sophomore class tackled a design challenge to reimagine the 21st century library to learn foundational skills in ethnographic interviewing, brainstorming solutions, and building prototypes to get early user feedback.

DISCOVERING YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL SWEET SPOT

Students applied their ethnographic interviewing skills to uncover an authentic need in the world that intersected a team passion and a set of abilities they possessed to deliver on the need.

REFINING CONCEPTS & BUILDING YOUR BUSINESS PLAN

Students spent three months conducting interviews with their audience, getting feedback on early ideas, and fleshing out a rough business plan. Teams advanced based on rigor of concept and commitment to the idea.

PITCHING TO VC PANEL FOR FUNDING

The finalists gave a 7-minute pitch to a panel of Silicon Valley VCs and seasoned entrepreneurs, including a live demo of their concept, its value proposition, analysis of the competitive landscape and proposed revenue model.

The Outcome:

Discouraged by the lack of female presence in STEM, one team came up with the idea of ‘STEMist Doll’ and app. The purpose of the STEMist Doll is to help young girls learn basic coding syntax while building a conversational relationship with their doll.

The team is following in the footsteps of GoldieBlox whose mission is to “disrupt the pink aisle” and give girls an alternative to images of women portrayed by Barbie and others.

They began by building the app to learn how best to couple the goal of giving girls confidence in basic coding syntax with the motivation to teach her doll conversational abilities such as IF I say “hello,” THEN say “how are you?”