The Future Design School launched in Toronto this week, a new initiative to encourage entrepreneurship in high schools around the world, led by Sarah Prevette.
Since building Sprouter and BetaKit, and then joining the VC ranks, Prevette has never stopped thinking about building a high school for entrepreneurs. Future Design School aims to develop courses and teach kids the critical skills of ideation, prototyping, design thinking, presentation of ideas, and ultimately, showing how to apply all these skills to solve real-world problems. The first FDS micro-campus landed at MaRS Discovery District this Thursday.
“For the past several years, we’ve been fortunate to meet all these incredible entrepreneurs, and every time we asked how they got into entrepreneurship, we realized for many of them it all came down to a lucky coincidence and serendipity,” Prevette told BetaKit. “Why don’t we teach the tools for innovation, why isn’t entrepreneurship taught as a viable career choice? How could you take all this wonderful education we learned the hard way of building startups and products and take it to kids, let them build on their ideas?”
FDS wants to find scalable ways to engage with libraries and school boards, and anyone interested in helping is encouraged to reach out to the FDS team. The first few programs, built to encourage creativity, critical thinking and entrepreneurship for students, Grades 6-12, bur Prevette and FDS team have a grander ambition in mind.
“Schools should really be about letting kids explore what they’re interested in, diving into that and finding ways to fix problems,” Prevette said. “We’ve seen way too many smart people wasting time and building things that don’t matter. There’s something vitally important about getting kids to focus on real problems, and put the onus on smart people to actually do something about the real problems in society, creatively problem-solve, and build on their ideas. This won’t be just workshops and camps. It’ll be about getting this into a water supply globally, and create a community of innovators.”
FDS is currently hiring teachers and facilitators in London, Toronto, Barrie, Hamilton, Markham and Waterloo. Those interested in lending support can head to futuredesignschool.com or follow @fdesignschool on twitter.
