Don Wettrick is a 21-year veteran educator who teaches students how to turn lemons into lemonade stands. His focus is on innovation, mindset and entrepreneurism. When the COVID-19 outbreak caused school cancellations and made e-learning the new normal, he – of course – saw it as an opportunity.
“I received several calls about supplying teachers with innovation curriculum for the days they would be doing e-learning,” Wettrick says. He gauged interest in the idea by emailing educators, and 150 teachers signed up in the first hour. This was enough for Wettrick to put his plan in motion through his nonprofit, the STARTedUP Foundation. “My fear was that if I didn’t do something, then thousands of students would just scroll through social media or YouTube all day.”
Wettrick recruited a group of “A-list” contributors to help source his material, including JT McCormick (president & CEO of Scribe Media), Nikhil Goel (co-founder of Uber Elevate), author and entrepreneur Steven Kotler, Nathan Harris (founder of Ease) and one of the most interesting people on the planet, Steve Sims. “Real value is derived from our students hearing from these experts themselves,” Wettrick explains.
His goal was to produce and publish the content prior to students returning from spring break. On March 25, STARTedUP’s team accomplished its mission with the launch of “Opportunities are Everywhere: Digital Design Challenge” – a free, five-part education series focused on entrepreneurial thinking and refocusing problems into opportunities. Specifically, the program tasks students with identifying problems within their community (e.g., those faced by a local nonprofit), collaborating with others, then sharing their results.
Dan Schultz, an engineering and entrepreneurship teacher at Hobart High School in Lake County, is extremely grateful for Wettrick’s efforts. His entrepreneurship students were on their way to opening a school café-bookstore before year-end, a project that has been interrupted by COVID-19. Like educators around the country, Schultz is now struggling to find ways to replace hands-on learning with online classwork.
“No teacher has two months of content ready for this situation. Don’s program helps me because it offers two weeks of curriculum that will keep my students motivated and gives me some time to figure out the rest of the semester.” Schultz intends to combine the STARTedUp classes with Zoom conference calls for live collaboration.
“You’re seeing people who are stepping up, doing the right thing and helping others. You’re also seeing people who aren’t. Don is definitely one of those guys who is helping,” Schultz affirms.
I would be remiss by not ending this Tech Talk with a call to action: Like many of you, I am busy trying to keep my young kids occupied and caught up on schoolwork, while at the same working my full-time day job. If you are privileged with any spare time, consider using it as an opportunity to help others. Maybe watch Opportunities are Everywhere as a source of motivation and request an invitation to the program’s LinkedIn group to collaborate with others by completing the form on the program’s landing page.
The STARTedUP Foundation’s mission is to empower students by immersing them into the entrepreneurial way of being, inspiring them to start something new and mentoring them through new ventures. Its goal is to prepare students to be enterprising contributors in this changing world. Access more information about STARTedUP and its programs, including Hackathons, the Student Venture Accelerator and Innovate WithIN.