ABOUT
Who We Are.
Glasshouse Christian College is a Prep to Year 12 Independent School located in the iconic Glasshouse Mountains on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland Australia. We are committed to providing a high quality of education, where students grow in faith and knowledge. On top of a rigorous academic suite of traditional subject offerings, we are particularly interested in what Education will look like in the future (5, 10, 20 years). As a response, we aim to provide relevant and authentic learning opportunities for our students to engage in and develop creative and critical thinking . In search of these goals we asked ourselves several questions; as a college, how can we best prepare our students for their futures? How can they pursue careers that currently do not exist; where the focus will be, not what one knows, but the skills one has, to acquire knowledge and apply it effectively? And ultimately, how can our young people contribute to society in meaningful ways? The answer we came up with was the DeLorean Project.
WHAT IS THE DELOREAN PROJECT?
Launched in 2016, the DeLorean Project aims to provide opportunities for students to learn and develop the capabilities and skills they will need to effectively navigate their journey through the 21st Century.
The program allows all Year 10 students in the cohort one day per week for the entire school year to negotiate and implement their own learning projects.
In the process of attempting to make their ideas a reality, students are learning entrepreneurial approaches like lean startup, rapid prototyping and customer validation. They are also developing important interpersonal skills like collaboration, reflective practices, and the ability to negotiate conflict and failure as they experience all the wins and losses that startups endure.
Additionally, it was recognised that for some students, particularly artistic and creative students, ‘solving a real-world’ problem is difficult to articulate. To cater for these students the project team created the tagline ‘THINK, CREATE and SHARE’ to encourage students to create according to their passion and share their creations with the world. Our hope is that this may empower students to value their own creative work in the market place and open up possible income streams that they hadn’t considered before.
The challenge: Find a passion/interest area to learn in, find a team to work with, and solve a real-world problem.
The Year 10 program is funded by Glasshouse Christian College, and has, to date seen over 300 students participate. Approximately 80 startups have been supported in the program since its inception with many receiving support and/or mentorship in the community, along with the opportunity to develop their idea/solution in an authentic environment beyond the program.
The highlight of the program is seeing young people realise their potential as they solve real-world problems and the learning that occurs when they have the opportunity to explore and work in an area of passion/interest/skill. The DeLorean Project is proof of concept for what education should look like in the future, where knowledge will be easily attainable and 'knowing stuff' will become far less important than the ability to communicate, collaborate, create and solve problems.
WHY CALL IT THE DELOREAN PROJECT?
Naming this project was a challenge in and of itself. We didn’t want to be obvious, nor did we want to be generic. We wanted to be relevant and have a forward thinking connotation. We wanted something that engendered and created its own air of mystery; something that made people go ‘Ahhhhh!’ when they got it.
The DeLorean Project’ was born shortly after Back to the Future Day – October 21st, 2015. Our ideas were starting to take solid shape and the concept of a workable, negotiated learning project was going to happen. All we needed was a name.
To us, it was like a bolt from the blue. The DeLorean, in the ‘Back to the Future’ movie trilogy, was the vehicle that brought about change, paved the way for the future, inspired so many possibilities and who wasn’t excited at the prospect of hoverboards?! The DeLorean was a great catalyst for transformation, a vehicle for opportunities and, ultimately, the perfect metaphor for our program. The parallels of innovation, creativity, collaboration and design that can be drawn between the ‘Back to the Future’ movies and our DeLorean Project communicate our purpose in a very fitting way.