RE Log - Spring 2020

SPRING 2020 Ransom Everglades LOG 21 RE Business Plan Challenge Entrepreneurship: The quintessential interdisciplinary experience As the Chair of the Humanities Department at Ransom Everglades, I may seem like a strange choice to author a story in a magazine spread highlighting the school’s excellence in STEM – science, technology, math and engineering. I am excited to do so because it illustrates a core belief that has driven me and other faculty across all disciplines at Ransom Everglades. Equipping students to solve the most challenging problems in the world today means requiring that they let loose their creativity, work collaboratively and seek novel, multi-faceted approaches that may require stepping outside of those realms in which they are comfortable. At Ransom Everglades, “problem solving” does not mean memorizing mathematical formulas or dates in history, or filling in bubbles on a Scantron form. It means thinking bigger and broader. It means crossing disciplines. It means tackling problems whose answers aren’t listed in some answer key in the back of the textbook. It means you can’t be just a specialist in economics, or just a mathematician, or just a writer. The challenges facing our students when they go out in the world today will require dramatic creativity, intellectual fluidity and the resilience to keep trying when they fail. Those are skills naturally nurtured in the annual business plan challenge that has been a core part of my AP Macroeconomics/ Microeconomics course for more than a decade. Entrepreneurship is the quintessential interdisciplinary experience: It is the place where science collides with the social sciences, math, language skills and the When Luisa Guarco ’19 joined her grandfather at a retirement home in Indiana for lunch on Thanksgiving 2018, she was dismayed to observe a woman sitting nearby who struggled because of hand tremors to eat her soup. The soup continually spilled before she could lift it to her mouth. Guarco recalled thinking: There must be a way to construct a spoon that would steady the contents and help this woman. She immediately thought of the physical principles governing the gyroscopic tools she used for orientation and stability while preparing to compete in robotics. Months later, Guarco and two classmates – Khushi Shah ’19 and Makenzie Love ’19 – offered a prototype for a spoon for people with essential tremors as the central component of the annual business plan challenge that is a critical part of RE’s AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics class under faculty member Jen Nero. The team researched competing devices, analyzed the market and devised a business strategy that they pitched to entrepreneur judges in several competitions. They never took their spoon – SpoonAble – to the market, but the students considered the experience invaluable. “Each of us brought something different to the process,” Guarco said from Tufts University, where she is now a freshman studying mechanical engineering. “We really poured our hearts and souls into it.” STEMat RE Jen Nero Khushi Shah ’19, Luisa Guarco ’19, Makenzie Love ’19