Four Homestead High School students spent the summer teaching business basics to fifth- through eighth-graders.
Sophomores Kristin Lee, Sanghyuk Ko, Ian Yoon and Chloe Kim founded Business Bloomers, a free summer camp for students who wanted to learn virtually the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. They registered more than 150 students, nationally and internationally, Ko said.
The four Business Bloomers founders took a business class their freshman year. Learning about business principles such as accounting and marketing inspired them to teach the concepts to those who are not enrolled in such classes, according to Lee.
“There are certain skills we learned in this class that aren’t present in the traditional academic course, and because of that, a lot of students are really missing out on knowledge essential to them,” Lee said. “This is our way of giving back to the community, because we are privileged enough to have these opportunities and learn about business.”
To reach a wide variety of students, the founders used social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Kim said they also reached out to school districts across the nation to send out email blasts and information regarding the camp.
“We’re really proud of ourselves for getting not only local, but international participation,” Lee said. “I feel like we’re starting to make an impact on not only the community, but the world as a whole because of that international participation.”
Engaging young minds
There were two one-week sessions of the camp, each with 50-60 kids actively participating. Yoon said the four founders created the lesson plans, slides and activities for each day.
“We tried to make our lesson as fun as possible through having interesting videos, so not only educational how-to videos. We added a clip from ‘Curious George’ to explain how marketing works,” Ko said. “We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the students and our younger selves to make sure everything was very interactive and engaging.”
Yoon said another thing the founders took into consideration was the creativity of the kids, so they came up with activities that allowed the students to showcase their ideas. One activity involved demonstrating the three types of leadership, but the prompt was that they had to impress a professional artist by creating an art piece exemplifying one of them.
“That really gave them the creativity to do whatever they wanted, and not only doing that, but also practicing the business and leadership skills we were giving them,” Yoon said.
Each day highlighted a different topic, and at the end of the week, there was a final project and presentation for a potential business, Lee said. Some students chose to stay on the call longer because they were so enthusiastic about the project, Ko added.
The founders sent out a survey at the end of the camp to solicit feedback from the students. According to Lee, approximately 75% of students found that their public speaking skills improved over the week, as well as their general knowledge of business. More than 50% said they would attend the camp again.
Because of the success of the camp, Lee said the team is working on expanding the program beyond the summer. Ko said they plan to create an organization, Bloom Institute, focused on fields outside of business. Yoon noted that the team also may host an in-person camp with more engaging activities.
Yoon said he initially thought the camp’s success would be measured by the number of participants or how much students learned from it. However, he had a different take after the camp ended.
“I realized that it was more about sparking that initial interest in creating these passions for students,” he said. “By the end, I was really proud of the fact that we were able to introduce them to a new field of education that they may not be able to achieve through their elementary and middle schools.”
To sign up for the Bloom Institute email list, visit tinyurl.com/ye7xa5sh.
