Sponsors
Week 1
Team name: The Ideas Engineers
Tell us what you have been doing this week
-Learning about what Bright Stars is
-Understanding what we will be doing in the programme
-Looking at an application form to be apart of the team
-Asking questions about the project
-Discussing ideas from past projects
-Handing in applications with ideas presented
-Teachers liasing about who would thrive and benefit from the project
-Selecting and recruiting team members
What did you learn this week?
-what Bright stars is
-what a job application is like
-what we have to do as team
-the qualities we need to be a Bright Star
-what projects have been done before
-that not everybody will get the job
What did you find difficult this week?
-brainstorming ideas
-linking to an important cause
-sticking to budget
-thinking of unique ideas
-designing the product in mind
-meeting the deadline
One of MANY Bright Stars applications from one of our Year 4's!
They even provided an additional page to explain their product!
Week 2 - half term
Week 3
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Attended our first meeting
- Got to know our project manager, Hannah
- Discussed ideas as a team for the first time
- Voted for our favourite ones
- Narrowed it down to two
- Considered different charities and local community
- Discuss important causes
- Discuss practicality of both product ideas
- Look at prices for resources for each product
- Took a final vote to choose our product
What did you learn this week?
-What a project manager is
-Facts about Hannah
-Why we vote in a team
-How much there is to think about in a project
-What local charities we have that help animals
-That some ideas can be great but not practical
-The importance of listening to others and voicing opinions
What did you find difficult this week?
-Making decisions
-Deciding on a product from so many ideas
-Choosing a charity when there are lots we want to support
-Listening to everyone's ideas
-Trying to speak in a large group
The Bright Stars Team 2023 full of pride in their first official meeting!
Members discussing, listening and brainstorming potential product ideas.
Exploring the factors for building our business and creating our two product types.
Working through the 5P's of business with our project manager - Hannah!
Week 4
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Met with Hannah for the first time as a team
- Understood the 5P's of business
- Told Hannah about our idea
- Clarified that we were allowed to make 2 products to support the human and animal community, equally
- Discussed team names
- Discussed a mission statement for our team
- Split into 2 groups to start a mindmap for each product
- Started planning Place, People and Product part of our business plan
- Listened to Hannah to understand different job roles for our team
- Decided which roles we liked best individually
- Put names forward for each role
- Completed applications for roles
What did you learn this week?
- What the 5P's of business are
- Why they are important
- What a mission statement is
- That we could make 2 products
- How we can implement social value into our products
What did you find difficult this week?
- Working under time constraints
- Keeping the social value alive in our products (until we discussed in our mini teams)
- Deciding what our products would include
- Estimating prices for products
Week 5
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Were assigned roles within the business team
- Understood what HR was
- Looked at what a finance team does within a business
- Completed some mathematical tasks together to apply these skills to our business
- Discussed profit and what it means to make a profit
- Discussed how much it would be to make one of each of our products
- Talked about donations to save money from our budget
- Discussed how much we would sell in product for in order to make a profit
- Looked at local charities to support
- Discussed local businesses that we could work with and seek support from
What did you learn this week?
- What you do within a finance team
- How to make a profit from your product and how this affects decisions for prices
- Found out that HR stands for Human Resources
- That donations are very valuable for saving money
What did you find difficult this week?
- Completing the maths tasks to improve our finance skills
- Thinking of prices for our products that would be fair but profitable
Bright Stars members looking into finance planning together!
Our Finance Team working with Hannah, our business mentor!
Our Product Design Team, working hard creating logos!
Looking at effective marketing with Hannah, our business mentor!
Week 6
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Looked at marketing
- Understood what marketing was
- Looked at different examples of effective marketing
- Discussed logos
- Marketing team discussed and designed posters for our sales
- Product Design Team worked on designed our products and annotating them for resources
- Discussed our orders
- Finance Team checked that we stayed within budget
- Placed orders for making products
- Social Value Team discussed ways we can reach out to the community, human and animal
- Reached out to Morrisons about selling our product in their store
- Asked Morrisons for donations and collected these
What did you learn this week?
- The key elements of a poster
- The accuracy a product design needs
- The importance of teams working together and communicating effectively
- How generous our local community is
- What a logo needs to be like to be memorable
What did you find difficult this week?
- Choosing a logo
- Finishing posters under our time constraints
- Finding the best resources to order for quality, quantity and price
- Making product designs accurate
Week 7
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Discussed methods for making our bird feeders
- Made sure we had all the resources
- Split up into teams to create them: 1 team mixed the ingredients, 1 team used the cookie cutters to shape the bird feeders and 1 team put these on trays for the fridge while quality checking them
- Checked each day through the week to see if they were setting
- Realised that they were not sticking together as well as we hoped
- Discussed alternatives with any resources we had left
- Came up with ideas of making bird feeder bags
- Decorated the bags and filled with bird seed
- Finished with left over holly
What did you learn this week?
- Sometimes ideas do not always go to plan
- Each team member needs to be accurate with measuring ingredients
- Communication is key to avoid mistakes
- Resilience pays off
- How to be problem-solvers and remain calm and positive in crisis
- How to be resourceful
What did you find difficult this week?
- Staying in our own teams
- Communicating with each other so everyone is on the right line
- Setting our bird feeders
- Finding a good alternative to not lose profit
- Remaining calm and positive
Some of our mixing team, working hard to get the right consistency!
Two of our cookie cutting team, focused on perfecting our product!
Our finished baubles!
Baubles consisting of biodegradable twine and forest finds!
Week 8
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Looked at our product designs for the baubles
- Checked we had all of the resources
- Discussed how to make them
- Made sure every team member understood the method
- Made our baubles and quality checked them before moving onto another
- Received orders from our posters
- Made 'thank you' notes for orders
- Finance team counted our baubles and bird seed bags
- Estimated how much profit we would make from selling all of our products
- Discussed what we would do with spares after our Morrisons sales
- Decided on a stall at the afternoon Christmas play at school.
- Decided to donate any left.
What did you learn this week?
- How to make our product
- How to quality check a product and be critical with standards
- How to show appreciation to customers through orders
- How many bird seed bags and baubles we were going to be taking to market
- Compared these results to our finance plan
- Reflected on how we'd improve
What did you find difficult this week?
- Being careful with securing the baubles together - we had a few breaks from pushing together too hard!
- Measuring the length of twine
- Quality checking each product, our own and our team mates.
Week 9
Tell us what you have been doing this week
- Separated orders from product for market in Morrisons - Travelled to Morrisons - Set up our stall with our posters and advertising - Served customers - Listened to their comments and needs - Worked out change for customers - Counted up our money - Calculated our profit - Reflected on our selling at Morrisons - Reflected on our Bright Stars journey - Planned our scripts for our video - Practiced reading our scripts - Recorded our video
What did you learn this week?
- How to deal with difficult customers - How important team work is during busy selling - How to talk to customers appropriately - How to persuade customers to buy products/more than on product - How to work out profit from selling a product
What did you find difficult this week?
- Remaining positive and confident when dealing with difficult customers - Counting the money accurately - Learning our lines from our scripts
For pupils to answer:
In one sentence please tell us what bright stars has meant to you?
bright stars has helped us understand what it takes to run a business. i would like to run a business when i am older and now i know all the things i need to think about before starting one.
For teachers to answer:
Can you tell us the impact this programme has had on your school?
Over the past 9 weeks, the children have worked really hard to set up The Ideas Engineers and to carefully consider how their social enterprise not only generated profit to be placed towards their chosen charity of Knoxwood and their forest school but how that products itself is linked to provide benefit to the wildlife around up and place nature at the forefront of the communities minds at this cold time of year. The product and profit are in intrinsically linked, which makes the social enterprise special. The children decided on Christmas themed bird feeders to support our local wildlife in winter, both within their own forest school and the gardens of Cleator and Cleator moor. The products profit then goes towards ensuring habitats and care for wildlife is provided via the development of the schools forest schools and Knoxwood.
The children also decided on festive baubles for indoor trees as a product that can be kept for years to come, reusable, and put a smile on the faces of those in with the community at Christmas and remind them of nature by including a leaf, a mini pine cone, feather and holly inside.
Initially the children thought they could sell via the schools Christmas Fayre as a distribution route, but upon consideration it’ll be so busy they worried the products would get lost and the meaning of the enterprise be overshadowed by the fayre. Instead, they have gone via a marketing and advertising route to simulate business with posters being displayed in the local library and local businesses as well as on the schools Facebook page, this lead to multiple bulk orders. The companies could place pre-orders the enterprise will fulfil. The enterprise also reached out to the Morrisons Foundation and Morrisons in Whitehaven allowed the children to have a stall to sell their goods to the public. The Morrisons foundation also provided a donation of bird seed and lard. The stall in Morrisons sold out in 2 hours and brought it £379.
The children had to further be resilient when the lard and bird seed mix didn’t take and they needed to come up with a new way of packaging the bird seed, which they did. The children learnt how to overcome challenges with creative thinking and new ideas. The clear baubles ordered were also too small so they had to work quickly to reorder and buy larger, this taught them how supply chain issues can affect production and how to deal with challenges.
The children have learnt that listening carefully is a key skill in business and leadership, and sometimes this is a challenge. They have also learnt everyone deserves a voice and a platform to express their thoughts but good leadership ensure business keeps moving forwards. They have found it interesting to learn the business phrases such a lead time, workflow, profit margins, brand awareness and so forth. The challenges have been fixing down ideas into what is tangible in the time scale and still respect the big ideas, it has also been challenging to find time to ensure everything is completed on time as well as the challenge faced with multiple changes to events and product hiccups.
Overall, the children should be so proud and have done exceptionally well, they have learnt that it can be very hard work being part of a social enterprise but that the feeling when you succeed and do well to provide for the community.
Please provide your business plan.
Please provide your marketing plan.
Please provide your finance report/template.
Charity name/money donated to.
50% for our Forest School and 50% for Knoxwood Wildlife Trust
Final profit (minus the £50 seed funding).
£391.27
Our Bright Stars representatives, pictured with their stall, ready to sell their product at our local Morrisons!
Bursting with pride after leaving with only 8 baubles, purchased shortly afterwards by the parents of our Bright Stars!
