How project-based learning prepares students for the future

Scotland has always punched well above its weight in terms of innovation. The steam train, the telephone, the television, and Dolly the Sheep are all products of Scottish innovation.

Even today, there is an extremely vibrant startup business ecosystem north of the border. To continue this great tradition, we launched START, a project-based learning programme for final year school students. It harnesses the tools and mindsets of design, entrepreneurship, and storytelling to bring the experience of participating in a startup incubator to Scottish schools.

As the rapid evolution of AI has demonstrated, we are living in a period of revolutionary technological change that is increasingly making the future of work hard to predict. As teachers, we often find ourselves asking how we can best prepare young people in this shifting landscape.

“We are not, as some fear, headed for a ‘post-knowledge’ future.

A report commissioned by the UK Design Council suggests a way forward: “Tomorrow’s innovative companies and organisations rely on people who can marry subject expertise with skills and knowledge from outside their individual specialisms, and who approach projects with creativity.”

If this is true, we are not, as some fear, headed for a “post-knowledge” future, where traditional school subjects are no longer relevant. Rather, young people will require the ability to make creative connections across subject domains to bring the totality of their knowledge to bear in solving complex problems.

They will need soft skills to work collaboratively and flexibility to adapt to new discoveries the future will bring. They will need a resilient mindset to deal with uncertainty and failure, and tenacity and empathy to approach hard problems and seek new and better solutions. They will need to be able to research, analyse, prototype, test, network, and persuade. In short, they will need the skills of design, entrepreneurship, and storytelling that can be taught through project-based learning.

“Many in education recognise the need to teach young people that failure can be positive.

Often, I have felt that my efforts to develop such skills and mindsets in pupils have been analogous to showing a video of a marathon and expecting the viewer to become better at long-distance running. But skills and mindsets need concrete experiences more than theoretical discussions to develop properly – as well as the guidance of teachers and mentors.

Many in education recognise the need to teach young people that failure can be positive. But what is needed is a problem-solving process that they can follow where failure is both inevitable and demonstrably necessary to learning. This is precisely what START offers.

In teams, students form new startup businesses by identifying a meaningful real-world problem that they attempt to solve by designing a new product or service. The startups then build a business case and deliver a pre-seed investment pitch to a panel of industry experts. Participants acquire the tools to apply all the subject expertise and life-learning they have gained across their education so far and benefit from mentoring from designers and entrepreneurs.

This approach is having a hugely positive impact on participants. One, for example, began his final year at school unsure of his future, but discovered through START a passion for problem solving as he applied his knowledge of computing to a problem he had spotted with safety at music festivals.

“Surgeons and lawyers have said that the capacities we are building are also essential in their fields.

He created Festag, a wearable smart medical alert system that provides a simple and efficient way to contact the emergency services, display relevant medical information, and speak to a family member. Aligning his passions for music and computing produced a transformative experience in his education because it changed the way he engaged with learning. This, in turn, allowed him to make clear decisions about his future and to move on to study computing science at university with confidence.

But the tools and mindsets fostered aren’t only applicable to students who aim to become entrepreneurs or design engineers. I have spoken to surgeons and lawyers who have told me that the capacities we are building are also essential in their fields. In essence, the entrepreneurial mindset is simply the inner drive for constant improvement, while design teaches that empathising with users and customers is the best guide to progress.

“We are developing ambitious plans to double the size of the programme.

The future is bright for START: we’ve received over £65,000 in support from the Scottish Government’s Entrepreneurial Education Fund to pilot the programme in three local authority partner schools across Glasgow, and we are actively engaging with industry and further education institutions to grow our network of mentors and gain SCQF accreditation.

We are developing ambitious plans to double the size of the programme next session to create opportunities for more young people, including many who may not have previously considered entrepreneurship as a viable aspiration. We are on an exciting mission to ignite Scotland’s pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit within schools.

For more information about START please visit: https://www.highschoolofglasgow.co.uk/start

To watch a case study video with the pupil mentioned above, click here.