Mauna Loa’s Business Progress

About a month ago, the six of us finally realized that we loved education. We’d been floundering for a while since our ideas were all such huge ‘save the world’, ‘make an impact’, ‘everyone’s life will be better’ ideas. The nature of these huge ideas is that they’re not specific. With six people it was extremely difficult to focus in on one idea enough to get it to the stage where it was actually something that we could make a business plan out of. Our final focus on education went a little something like this

Steve Gold: So…why don’t you guys try to narrow this down a little. Ideate in something you’re all interested in.

Me: Well, I like sustainable design, green engineering, psychology, sociology, and education.

Andy: Education.

Christina: Helping people communicate, especially getting information to teachers and then students.

Evan: Maps

Marco: I really want to take an idea from start to finish, and I’m excited about Olin’s unique take on education.

Steve Gold: Well, it sounds like you’re all more than a little interested in education…

From there, we all came back home with a lot more focus and drive than we had had before. I think a lot of us had given up on the idea of having a unified project. Six was a big group, and we hadn’t really come into LOA with a coherent idea. While it would have been nice to have something together, taking LOA as an individual with group support was still a great experience, if not quite as planned.

Fast forward to last week—we’ve basically been doing UOCD nonstop. Our idea has been narrowed down to a web based tool to facilitate communication within and outside of schools, in the middle school realm. All of us have been visiting middle schools, observing, talking to teachers, students, and parents about anything we can get our hands on. We’re due to have a complete business plan drafted next week, along with a technical outline of our product.

Tomorrow I’m going to the MASSCUE conference (for Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) in Sturbridge, which means I’ll be waking up in about 5 hours. So goodnight, and wish me luck tomorrow!

-Alyshia