Wrapping up a huge term 2 for the Secondary Schools Program🙌

What a term it's been! These eleven weeks have brought a range of new and continuing initiatives that we've absolutely loved working on. We wanted to provide an insight into what we've been up to here, along with a ✨HUGE THANK YOU✨ to all the people at Macquarie University Incubator, Young Wisdom and all our affiliated schools that make this work possible on a daily basis.👏

Term 2 highlights included:

• Codesigning and delivering the Ryde Mayor's Youth Summit
• Concluding our first semester-long Ideas Challenge program
• Hosting a Teacher Roundtable meeting with 7 schools in attendance
• Preparing our first online courses for students/teachers
• Multiple school visits
• 2 successful multi-school bootcamps at MQ Incubator
• Supporting Year 9 Commerce at Castle Hill High School
• In-school extracurricular programs and pitch nights for PLC Sydney, Redlands and Willoughby Girls High School

If you want to read up on any of the highlights mentioned above, just keep scrolling🐠👇

Ryde Mayor's Youth Summit

We kicked off Term 2 in a big way by hosting the Ryde Mayor's Youth Summit at Macquarie University. We had the opportunity to run an express design sprint for local high school students, community organisation representatives and several councillors, including Mayor Trenton Brown, who all actively participated in the day's activities.

Big thanks to Tasha, Lisa and all the team at City of Ryde for the chance to collaborate on this. From a Young Wisdom perspective, with Shahe living and working in Ryde, it was an honour to be able to facilitate youth voice and intergenerational collaboration in such a fun and convivial atmosphere with the possibility of very real and tangible outcomes for our local area. 

Ideas Challenge: Multi-School Semester Program and Pitch Night

The reformatted semester-long Ideas Challenge ran over Terms 1 and 2 this year, culminating in a phenomenal pitch night hosted at the Macquarie University Incubator (pictured below). You can watch the event video below, and click through to the full blog post for all the details about our fourth cohort!

A huge congratulations to all the teams that took part, whether or not they made it all the way to pitch night; collectively, cohort 4 teams unlocked 191 Macquarie University-issued microcredentials for successfully passing our 3 human-marked assessment tasks! 

Another shout-out to the parents, teachers and school executives who attended to support their students, as well as the teacher representatives from seven schools who joined us a couple of hours early for our most recent Teacher Roundtable event. It was an exciting discussion, with many teachers sticking around to also watch the pitches. Those schools included: Arthur Phillip High School, Castle Hill High School, Domremy College, Knox Grammar School, Tallawong High School, The Ponds High School and William Clarke College.

We're currently taking Ideas Challenge applications for Cohort 5, which is open to any students in Years 9 and up! Keep scrolling for more info👇

Want to read more about the most recent Ideas Challenge and our Term 2 Pitch Night on 28 May? See the full write-up here.

Are you a student in Years 9 and up wanting to join Cohort 5 over Terms 3 and 4 this year? Learn more about this free but competitive program and find the application here. Applications are open until 8pm on Friday 4 September.

If you're a teacher, careers adviser or school executive, you can use the same link above to make this available to any/all students in Years 9 and up. You can always send it out in your notices, and just email us if we can assist further by sending you a flyer, poster or even  a real live human to speak at an upcoming assembly for a couple of minutes! We're happy to help🫡

Self-Paced Courses: Course 1 (Empathy & Research) is here! 

This term we put together our first online courses, which will be hosted on Coursera and made freely available to any secondary schools in NSW.

Georgia Muriti, pictured above, helped design, write and present Course 1, Empathy & Research, which is being piloted with teachers in Terms 3 and 4 of this year. Georgia is a Psychology (Honours) graduate from Macquarie University, an MQ Incubator resident founder with her own startup - Welv, and a Senior Entrepreneurship Educator with Young Wisdom.

The first course covers three modules: 

• Empathy & Pre-Research Foundations: understanding ourselves and our biases, using personas and empathy maps, and finding problems worth solving 
• Primary Research: primary research methods (observation, survey, interview), limitations, and interpersonal skills like holding conversations, asking better questions and really listening to answers
• Secondary Research & Market Understanding: how to leverage trusted sources, the importance of critical thought and how AI can help you here without doing all the thinking for you

The course is broken up into 14 short videos, matching readings, quizzes and a final assessment. 

There are a few different ways these courses can be used:

• Teachers can send out the links for interested students to complete in their own time, which will result in a MQ-issued microcredential.
• Teachers can use the course materials as teaching & learning resources in their own programs across various subjects, which definitely seemed like the preferred option at our most recent Teacher Roundtable event! 
• Teachers could use the resources to help run their own entrepreneurship clubs during lunchtime or after school, which we'd always be happy to chat about too.

School Visits

We participated in various school visits this term, some SSP-funded and some school-funded, with some highlights mentioned below.

Through the Macquarie University Access & Widening Participation Roads Program, Shahe Momdjian and Brenton Millard from the MQ Incubator team had the opportunity to chat with Year 10 students at both Seven Hills High School and Riverstone High School over a half-day each. Introducing students to entrepreneurial skills and opportunities like the Ideas Challenge came in the form of various activities, including impromptu speaking games and rapid empathy exercises.

Shahe also had the chance to speak to various groups of North Sydney Girls at a careers day, sharing his story of starting Young Wisdom in high school at North Sydney Boys, with all the hard-won lessons and surprises along the way. 

At any school visit, our intention is always to give each student a practical life skill technique that could be practised further any day of the week (like asking more and better questions in conversations with friends), regardless of any future entrepreneurial plans or aspirations.

Shahe also joined James and Fady, MQ Incubator resident founders of SoCreative, at Castle Hill High School for an honest and wide-ranging talk on all things aspiration, grit, trust, accountability, relationship-building and success as part of CHHS' after-school STRIVE program. Big thanks to them for sharing their story to date with students actively thinking about the paths they'd like to forge during and beyond school.

Term 2 Multi-School Bootcamps at MQ Incubator

Our fully-funded, multi-school bootcamps are always a fun time, with many of our team getting to work with students from multiple schools through a fun and challenging day of entrepreneurial skills-building. We power through challenges that even many adults consider to be difficult, e.g. talking to strangers (students from other schools), collaborating in new teams under time pressure, creative thinking, rapid prototyping, feedback gathering, and impromptu speaking. Through our guided coworking sprints, students go from having just met each other to pitching hypothetical ventures together by 2:30pm. 

The message isn't that that's how good startups are created (we actually call them 'disposable ideas' to make this clear); the message is we can all develop genuine life skills on a day-to-day basis, do hard things that will help us regardless of our career aspirations, build a creative and solutions-oriented mindset, and have fun in an inspiring space with students we've never met before.

We welcomed about 60 students from 8 schools across our two multi-school bootcamps in Term 2. Schools included: Holroyd High School, Kellyville High School, Knox Grammar School, NBSC Cromer Campus, North Sydney Girls High School, Pittwater High School, Pittwater House, and William Clarke College. A big thank you to all the schools and teachers who made these excursions possible for their students, we know it's not easy!🙏

Check out some of their feedback below👇

Pictured above: Eraga Magotti, MQ Incubator resident founder of Akili Sono and an Entrepreneurship Educator with Young Wisdom, demonstrating his startup pitch to the class.

The MQ Incubator offered unique experiences to our students, explicitly teaching them skills in collaborating, ideation and problem solving that is often normally skipped over in regular activities. Students all walked away feeling more confident and supported and ready to take on new challenges. 

The students had a chance to work with peers from across Sydney and increase their understanding of what it's like to be an entrepreneur.

A highly engaging and inspirational entrepreneurial workshop. Our students from North Sydney Girls High School thoroughly enjoyed the day collaborating with other students and further developing their skills.

This is an excellent program that challenges students to think critically and creatively! The team at Young Wisdom create a supportive environment which allows students to challenge themselves and step outside their comfort zone. The skill set that is developed throughout the day is not only valuable for design thinking but life in general. Awesome work guys and we will be back again! 

If you're a teacher, careers adviser or school executive who would be interested in joining a full-day bootcamp excursion to the MQ Incubator in Term 3, click here to learn more and reserve a spot for you (representing a group of up to 8 x Y9/10 students) whenever you're ready.

We'd love to welcome you to (or back to) the MQ Incubator!

Year 9 Commerce at Castle Hill High School

This term we've been working with Year 9 Commerce students at CHHS as they work through a Market Day program. We worked with the entire cohort over 2 x single-school bootcamps hosted at the Macquarie University Incubator, and then followed up with each class in the first of 2 x full-day incursions just this week.

In our engaging and practical way, we covered key concepts like unit economics, branding and selling, packaging and merchandising, as well as empathy and feedback gathering - all to help them maximise profits on the day and funds raised for Bear Cottage.

Working alongside passionate teachers wanting to create a memorable, practical and applied learning experience for their students is always a pleasure, and it was great to see students develop real commercial acumen and excitement for the big day ahead.

Young Wisdom works closely with schools to develop their own in-school term, semester, or year-long programs for the ongoing support of student entrepreneurs or those just exploring and wanting to build real life skills and a sense of agency.

Through our close association with Macquarie University Incubator and the Secondary Schools Program, we can also offer exciting additional opportunities like MQ Incubator-hosted pitch nights, MQ Incubator resident founders as guest speakers, teaching & learning resource sharing and much more. 

The next three highlights are about some of these initiatives - a big thank you and congrats to all our teacher colleagues and students at these schools for their significant and consistent efforts throughout these programs!

PLC Sydney Startup Club: Semester Program and Pitch Day

This year we launched a school-funded Startup Club with PLC Sydney. The first cohort experienced a 16-week program designed to support students in exploring, designing and launching real products and business ventures.

Georgia, Josie and Shahe from the Young Wisdom team worked closely with PLC teachers from HSIE, Science and D&T each week to ensure students were consistently progressing towards their own goals throughout the program.

It culminated in a wonderful pitch day at PLC, with exciting plans in the works for supporting continuers before the next Startup Club cohort in 2027. 

Redlands Startup Studio: Term Program and Pitch Night

Our Redlands collaboration is into its third year in 2026, with students continuing through a term-long pre-accelerator program in Term 2. This was also our first school program to end in an MQ Incubator-hosted pitch night, which was a nice bonus for students and a fitting way to see out the term. 

James, Annabelle and Shahe worked closely with Redlands staff members, now including MQ Incubator alumna Savannah Brown, to create a supportive and encouraging environment for students to take real-world action and build their commercial thinking, confidence and agency.

Willoughby Girls High School: Semester Program and Pitch Night

We recently wrapped-up our first semester-long program for Willoughby Girls High School with our second MQ Incubator-hosted pitch night. It was fantastic to see 9 pitching teams delivering highly persuasive, conversational pitches with such enthusiasm and gusto.

Nadia, James and Shahe worked closely with this cohort and their supervising teacher through this practical and rigorous program designed to facilitate transferable skills-building and real-world business validation.

The pitch night was kindly emceed by Year 12 students who had previously made it to an Ideas Challenge Pitch Night and won second prize with their bicycle upcycling concept, Re:Cycle.

If you would like to discuss a Young Wisdom-run, Macquarie University Incubator-supported program for your school in the coming months, feel free to reach out for a no-obligation chat any time on: hello@youngwisdom.com.au 

About the Secondary Schools Program  

Macquarie University Incubator and Young Wisdom teamed up in late 2023 to create a range of entrepreneurial skills-building opportunities for young innovators and their supporters. To date, we've reached over 10,100 students and more than 90 different schools across NSW.

Macquarie University Incubator is a leading community of innovators being supported with facilities, mentorship, events and programming designed to help them launch and scale their groundbreaking ventures globally.

Young Wisdom is a Sydney-based social enterprise offering entrepreneurial upskilling opportunities and support services on a mission to help young founders launch and grow their new ventures with confidence.

Any interested teachers, parents and students can subscribe to receive our email updates to make sure you get all the latest info straight to your inbox!✌️