#Entrepreneurship & Design Thinking

Living in the Bay Area, we are in close proximity to the most important and innovative companies in the world. This course will leverage the unique accessibility we have to cutting edge fields and empower students to create a unique product, service or program that is original, viable and socially beneficial. In addition to employing the design thinking process, students will be equipped with marketing skills and techniques that allow them to engage a fast emerging industry and strategize on ways to create their own business entities. Students will learn different methods of utilizing social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in order to promote the products, programs or services that they create.

We will begin with our first meeting in a BlendEd school classroom and then the subsequent meetings will involve field trips to some of the major local social media companies in order to give students a hands-on experience of seeing entrepreneurship in action. There are no prerequisites for the course. There will be 4 face-to-face (F2F) meetings over the course of the semester with exact dates and details to be announced as available. We usually participate in The Diamond Challenge (the world’s top entrepreneurship competition for high school students), as well as take an April field trip to Facebook and visit Google HQ in May for our culminating F2F.

About the Instructor

Sanjev deSilva – Athenian School
Sanjev brings over 15 years of expe­ri­ence in education, youth devel­op­ment, and com­mu­nity ser­vice to the BlendEd consortium. His life’s mis­sion is to empower young peo­ple to be lead­ers and to cre­ate pro­gres­sive change in their com­mu­ni­ties. Sanjev is currently a humanities seminar teacher at The Athenian School. Sanjev also brings two decades of work in the music industry field, working with many different artists, producers and labels in developing, marketing and promoting their brand.

Alum Spotlight

Spring 2018 #Entrepreneurship student Ylva B (LW ’20) shares how this course helped her launch a successful business.

Student Testimonials

The independence I was given in this specific class was great. It’s nice to feel trusted and responsible.
Senior at College Prep, Spring 2018

Not only did I love the topic but I also enjoyed all the assignments and face to face interactions. They added much more value as opposed to a field trip in a regular face to face class. Also, it helped me improve my time management skills as I had to be ahead on my assignments and always looking forward as some assignments would span out over one to two weeks (like conducting interviews).

Junior at Athenian, Spring 2019
I very much enjoyed the content and the field trip to Facebook.
Senior at Lick-Wilmerding, Spring 2017