Year 9 MentorPlace Scheme with IBM: Final Event!

On the final IBM event of the year we were back in Hursley. We worked on our team skills and practiced how to work through a problem efficiently.

Each of us are paired with a mentor who were there to help give us advice on careers and be there for us when the possibility of choosing collage options arrives.

We learnt about how people at IBM communicate during projects and how everyone will have a different job.

We found out there are many varieties of planning and we dabbled in each of them which gave us a broader range of ways to plan our ideas in the future.

However for most of the day we applied these skills to creating a new way for mentors and mentees to communicate with each other through the MentorPlace Scheme which resulted in most groups creating apps. Here are some snippets from the day...

Here is one of our starter activities which was fairly simple. We needed to work in our group so we could make a marshmallow stand on top of a sculpture without it breaking. We needed to try to make the sculpture the tallest but it could only be made from a metre of string, some tape and dry spaghetti!

We could then apply these skills when planning for our app.








We then stayed with our groups and used post-it notes to broadcast ideas around the idea that the mentors and mentees needed a better way to communicate. After previous planning we had decided an app would be the most plausible solution.

Here are examples of different groups' work and how it had all been set out. We were looking for ways to make the communication less confusing and easy to use. We came up with a lot of good ideas and no matter how strange the ideas were we kept them for this part of the day.

The post it note here shows a design idea for a home page of an app for the MentorPlace Scheme website.

Next it was time to analyse the work we had and remove the same type of ideas and organise the others. We did this for quite a long time until we broke for lunch (it was great!).

After lunch it was time to present to mentors and other groups. We worked out all of our ideas together and set up how the app would work by drawing out each page the user would open. Then we taped them together in an order of how they would open up. After this we cut out an iPad template and removed the screen part so we could see more realistically how it would work.

We presented and everyone had incredibly good ideas.

Luckily at IBM they do make apps and they clearly want to improve the MentorPlace communication. Today has given them the leverage to do so and hopefully talking to mentors will be very simple and quick once these new ideas are in place.

*Note: Also, the biscuits were tasty

Article written by Lisa Barnes

Well done to all of the people involved:

Charlotte Ettridge 9P2

Gemma Bone 9B2

Elizabeth Fletcher 9D2

Darcey Betteridge 9S1

Hannah Bray 9J1

Katie Smitheram 9J1

Lisa Barnes 9D1

Ellen Pitt 9J1

Brianna Norman 9D2

Anna Watters 9B1

Emiley Hinton 9S2

Miss Rymill