Igniting Social Entrepreneurship Towards Digital Wellbeing

This October, I got to spend 2 days with roughly 100 high school students at Grandview Preparatory School piloting a project designed to teach digital natives social entrepreneur skills in order to be changemakers towards a healthier and safer digital world. During both workshops, we used the design thinking process to generate and prototype solutions. It was a homecoming of sorts for me as I spent over a decade teaching and leading at the school, and even though it’s been over a decade since I have walked the halls daily, the values and spirit of innovation I internalized during my time there have remained my compass! Here’s what we got up to…

Our Design Challenges:

Day 1 – How can we increase quantity & quality of screen-free time?

Day 2 – How can we teach children how to build safe and healthy digital habits?

🙌 First, they shifted from student to expert. Why? Because these young people know what it’s like to grow up spending a big portion of each day online. The natural empathy and experiential insight in the room was through the roof!

📊 Next, we rounded out their lived experience with a look at some data to better define the problem as they were solving.

💡 Then we went through the ideation phase, thinking wildly and beyond reason to get all the ideas out!

🐢 Groups then built and presented prototypes of their ideas, sketching them, storyboarding, or in one case actually building a working model and roleplaying with it. The “social media turtle” that gobbles up phones and sparks conversations was a big creative hit! A few groups came up with policy ideas which would standardize digital wellbeing and safety education or age-gating. Other groups came up with board games, songs , or clubs that teach children about digital wellbeing and safety in a fun, engaging way.

The goal of this curriculum is to ignite young leadership and creative problem solving towards a healthier and safer digital future. Everything is open source with a facilitator guide and resource bank included here. Either experience can be broken up into multiple day lessons.

Day 1: Designing for Connection – 3 hour challenge

Day 2: Teaching Challenge – 3 hour challenge; this can also support the launch of the Teach 5 Challenge in your class!

We need to get kids thinking about this issue! They are the future leaders who can hopefully do a better job ensuring technology is safe and healthy for children to use.

Big thanks to Jackie Westerfield Laurie Houghton Alan Stob Aileen Palmer and the teachers at Grandview for getting in the sandbox with me. And of course, shoutout to all the young leaders at GPS who jumped right in…Carpe Diem!