Last week, students from Jeremiah E. Burke and Charlestown High School went to Northeastern University for their Business Skills Showcase. Before starting, the students and mentors were treated to some tasty Crispy Dough pizza while mingling between the schools. Mentors bragged about their group’s product and compared notes on progress. Things got underway as Ryan Oliver quieted everyone down and divided up the groups. There were four different workshops this week- social media, prototyping, PowerPoint and advertising.

Northeastern’s “NU BUILD” club hosted the workshop and it was nice to see the BUILD kids being able to relate to the Northeastern students as people they look up to. The social media workshop set all of the groups up with Twitter accounts and explained to them the best ways to use it. All of the groups also sent out their first Tweets! The prototyping workshop showed the students how to use simple household items into models of their products. One group, uPhone built a simple but usable device to attach to your phone to protect it from getting wet.

The PowerPoint workshop allowed the students to work on their PowerPoint presentations for Showcase Two, and the Northeastern student gave their own presentation on “The Do’s and Don’ts of PowerPoint” which advised students to avoid full sentences and to not read off the slides. The advertising workshop taught students about the basics of making an ad for a magazine or billboard. The Northeastern students told them to try to make it stand out without being vague. The most important thing was that people know what their product did from the ad.

This week students from Another Course to College and Charlestown High School have their second Showcase. We’re so excited to see the students’ progress!