Thanksgiving is usually a big game day. But today I didn’t watch football. I got "syphilis," did the chicken dance to earn my way into the barbed wire Fun Zone, and beat the English Rainbow.

ALA’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Curriculum uses BUILD labs (“BUILD” stands for Believe, Understand, Invent, Listen, and Deliver) to teach an entrepreneurial mindset that can be applied to absolutely anything you do. It’s essentially design thinking, but for high schoolers. And it is fabulous.

Today was the BUILD Lab Prototype Fair where the first year students shared their results for the latest lab. The challenge: to design an educational game for a 15 year old girl in Africa to help tackle the education crisis, as explained by www.girleffect.org. The prize: Three million (ALA) dollars.

 

 

Neil and I walked around the quad, tackling one game after the next. While playing “Tinkie Winkie” I landed on “Got a Job!” so I got to move forward four places. To “Syphilis.” Well, I can guess what your job was.

 

“Fun Zone” threatened to send you to the Slums if you couldn’t pay enough fun dollars to get into the barbed wire Fun Zone. You earn money by accepting Dares, answering Financial questions, and exposing your most embarrassing moments. Of course, I ended up in the Slums, condemned to the land of “Dirty Odour.”

 

One had “Sine Cosine Tangent” written for reference in the center of the board. I ran away.

 

“English Rainbow” required you to roll a 6 before you could even start playing the game. It teaches them patience. Clever girl. Another required coming up with objects that began with a set letter in a given category to improve language skills. When asked to come up with any object that began with a S, Josh blurted out “SILICONE!”

 

 

Happy Game Day, everyone. I am extra thankful for my job today.