Whilst the BOP team are Brisbane based, we love to get out to the regions to work with schools and students in our regional communities. To do this, we often work to put together a 'Regional Innovation Tour'. These tours see us lining up dates with a number of schools in a specific regional hub and working with each of these schools over the course of the week. We love organising these tours as it helps us impact as many students as possible in that community, whilst also offsetting any travel costs for the schools to keep it as affordable as possible.
A recent example of these regional tours would be our Townsville Regional Innovation Tour that we led in Semester Two, 2021. Over the course of three action-packed days our team worked with students from Pimlico State High School, Ryan Catholic College, and Thuringowa State High School as we delivered a suite of programs designed to inspire and engage students in their classroom learning.
At both Pimlico State High School and Ryan Catholic College our team had the pleasure of working with senior Design Technology students to explore sustainable design practices in our Sustainable Futures workshop. For this program, our team worked with the teachers from each school to identify key elements of the unit that students were covering in the classroom, and we worked to adapt the workshop to focus on those key areas. We had a great time working with the students and the feedback was that this workshop was a great way to get them thinking outside of the box, and identifying the real-world applications on the topics they were learning about.
From there, we then headed over to Thuringowa State High School to deliver a full-day Ideas Incubator workshop for their business and technology students. At Thuringowa, teachers are leading a very exciting collaboration of subjects that see business and technology students working together for a term to build and pitch a business idea. Our Ideas Incubator was a great opportunity to give students a taste of what to expect in the term ahead, whilst also getting their brains thinking about where they might take their idea, and how they could possibly bring it to life outside of the school business project.
We had a brilliant time up in Townsville working with these three schools on our regional innovation tour, and with restrictions continuing to ease, we look forward to getting back out to our regions more frequently moving forward.
For more information on how you can organise a regional innovation tour to your community, make sure to check out our Incursions Page to browse program options, and fill out a contact form to get in touch with our team.