When Enterprise Fair meets Ugly Christmas Sweaters
All the Fun of the Year 10 Enterprise Fair!
The Dulwich International High School Suzhou Year 10 Enterprise Fair is one of the highlights of the school calendar, that students and staff alike look forward to. This year, the event took place on Friday 10th of December in the school Gym from 10:05-11:50 precisely, with specific time slots for each year group to visit. It was amazing to see how quickly the school gym was transformed into a thriving marketplace, full of exciting stalls, selling innovative products to students and staff. It's an exciting and energetic day for our Year 10's as they get to see the culmination of all the effort they have put in during life skills lessons over recent weeks.
Why is the Year 10 Enterprise Fair Important?
The Year 10 Enterprise fair creates an environment in which students have all the choices when it comes to creating and operating their own businesses. It gives them the opportunity to evaluate their individual interests, skills, and resources; choose a company structure; assess the market; then develop a plan to advertise and sell goods and services for profit. Students must consider the costs of purchasing capital goods for their business. At the end of the Enterprise fair, they calculate their net profit, reflect on their experiences, and offer advice to their peers. In summary, the Enterprise fair gives our students a taste of what it's like to become a real entrepreneur.
Real-World Experience
The Enterprise Fair reflects important aspects of the real world. Fairs such as this are important as they teach a wide range of skills in a fully practical way, with obvious and visible outcomes. The Enterprise Fair challenges our students to develop innovative product ideas, identify market demands and compete with other businesses as they apply critical thinking and problem-solving skills in a real-world environment. These include setting a price that is high enough to yield a net profit, yet low enough to encourage customers to purchase.
- Choosing a business name
- Designing Compelling Marketing Material
- Utilizing resources to minimize costs.
This process helps students begin to understand profit as a motivating factor for entrepreneurs and to recognize the importance of entrepreneurship as a viable career choice. Look at the amazing efforts that our students put into their stalls; the results were remarkable:
The Enterprise Fair was the result of weeks of preparation and study of economic and entrepreneurial concepts. Our students researched ideas, read about professional entrepreneurs, utilized their math computation skills, and incorporated writing, technology, and design skills in the marketing and promotional material they created. In case you are wondering about the amount of ugly Christmas Sweaters that you can see in the photographs; The Enterprise Faire was made even more special this year by coinciding with another Dulwich Christmas tradition:
Ugly Christmas Sweater Day
is a day in which it’s not required to wear school uniform, if and only if, you are wearing a Christmas Sweater. However, the emphasis is on Ugly Sweaters, with fierce competition taking place for the dubious honour of wearing the Ugliest Christmas Sweater in the school. There is wide-ranging debate about what truly constitutes a genuinely horrific Christmas sweater. Breaking the cardinal fashion rule that “Red and Green Should never be seen” scarcely seems sufficient, given the arms race of woolly Christmas horrors that we witness year upon year. A sweater with integrated tinsel, or three-dimensional Christmas figures protruding from it, is required to elevate a merely unattractive sweater to the surreal heights of true Christmas Ugliness.
These two events complemented each other to create a very nice, and genuinely Christmassy experience that staff and students both appreciated and enjoyed
