Make your Mark Challenge!

In the early pre-dawn darkness of Monday November 17th, Mrs Mochan (Gifted and Talented Coordinator) turned on her laptop at home to read the secret brief for the Make Your Mark Challenge, the UK’s largest one-day enterprise competition for schools and colleges. At 9am, back at Greendown, she told 35 Year 9s and 10s who were participating in the event, what they had to do. They had just five hours to come up with an entrepreneurial idea - a unique and inspiring product or service which makes money - “inspired by the Olympic and Paralympic Values”. Their final presentation to a panel of judges, who had to pick a winning team, had to be supported by financial evidence, a competitors’ outline and a creative response.
This is the first time that Greendown has entered the Make Your Mark Challenge, which kick-starts National Enterprise Week. Teams of Gifted and Talented Year 9 and 10 students were also joined by year 10 Business Studies students and they were soon all busy discussing ideas, designing names and logos, working out budgets and researching competitors in the market.
Presentations began at 2pm before a panel of judges drawn not only from Greendown (Mr Tudor, Mr McGlaughlin, Mr Jones and Mrs Wilkinson) but also from the business community (Mr Robert Barrett, formerly Worldwide Line Manager with INTEL, and from ARVAL - Pam Halliday, New Business Development Director for UK and International and Alison Golden, Senior Accountant). Several teams presented impressive hand-drawn designs and PowerPoint notes, many had detailed budgets and evidence of research. And all impressed the judges.
In summing up, Mr Barrett praised how well the teams worked together and said the presentations were “models of cooperation and mutual support”. He also noted how seriously the students had taken the challenge, how well they had “thought through the issues” and in their responses to the judges’ questions “showed a depth of analysis that was very impressive.”
In the end, the team that won the judges’ unanimous vote as the winner was the S.O.S (Support Our Sports Stars) team. Their idea to produce a badge symbolising the 2012 Olympics and its partnership with up-and-coming sports stars of the future was considered to be both feasible and imaginative. And their presentation was both professional and convincing.
So congratulations to Kyle Fullerton, Tom Aslantepe, Scott Loudon, Joe Shepherd and Katie Tonks. We now wait to hear whether they have reached the next stage of the competition, to be held in Exeter on November 28th!
J Wilkinson and E Mochan