Description
The premise of this Dragon’s Den style workshop is that you want to convince a fictional “Billionaire Investor” to give financial backing to your idea or concept. This activity is mostly aimed at school pupils, where the class is broken up into teams and has to come up with an invention or an idea on a specific theme. This example focuses on space science and satellite technology. However, this activity can be adapted for a variety of topics and could also be reworked as a workshop for adult citizens to help develop ideas or improve their pitching skills. Teams will work together to research, plan and deliver a persuasive sales pitch and present them to your “potential investor” who will ask follow up questions about the idea and the reasoning behind the choices you have made. Can you persuade your investors that your idea is well thought out, and strike a deal?
Target Audience
- Adult citizens
- Children 7-12
- Teenagers
You can do it with all those groups, but we did it with professionals from different fields like public engagement or the cultural and creative sector.
Benefits
Benefits
This activity allows for participants to play an active part in the learning process and to develop research and communication skills. Participants also need to work as part of a team to develop the ideas and pitch them as a group.
This is a great classroom activity that can be done over multiple lessons and allows the students to re-contextualise what they are learning and apply this knowledge to real-world scenarios. Also by relating this activity to a television show and adding some level of competition, it really incentivises the learners and allows for a variety of learner types to engage with the topic in a multitude of ways.
Preparations
This activity can be set up as part of a lesson, or pre-arranged in advance for an event or workshop. To activity, the facilitator needs to set a theme and then either allow the group to divide themselves up into groups, or have these teams randomly/preselected.
The facilitator needs to explain the rules and how each of the pitches will be judged. Then time needs to be given for each team to conduct research on the chosen topic, develop their idea, and come up with a pitching strategy.
After a pre-determined period of time, the groups then have to pitch their ideas to either the “investors”. These can either be the facilitator or a panel of impartial judges. Although it is also recommended that if you have the resources, to invite a panel of experts in your chosen field, who know the topic well and can ask the teams relevant questions and provide insight into the ideas.
Following the pitches, the judges will have to decide which of the ideas were well enough thought out and deserve an “investment”. You may want to include prizes in lieu of actual payment.
Although this is set out as a fictional pitch meeting, it is possible for you to up the stakes and, offer more tangible rewards for ideas. But this would involve additional sponsorship and much more detailed planning.
Resources
This format was taken from Science Made Simple and The Our Space Our Future project, which use this school-based activity to educate school pupils about emerging satellite technology, as well as giving them an opportunity to develop some useful soft skills such as team building, research and presentation skills. To find useful teaching notes and other resources on how to conduct this event, as described above, please click here.
