My Experience with OWN Academy x Explorium Summer 2020 Program

The 21st century is an era of unprecedented change — of new forms of online communication, of artificial intelligence replacing human labor, and new technologies requiring new skillsets. Despite all this drastic change, education remains more or less the same. We’re in the 21st century and stuck learning 19th century, industrial age skills.

The OWN Academy x Explorium Summer Program delivers a real world experience that fosters 21st century skills — an invaluable opportunity that offers what schools cannot. During these 10 days, students from ages 12–18 become a business consultant for 3 companies — Toys R Us, Circle K, and Meiyume. At the end of the two weeks, the teams pitched their best solutions back to the businesses, and the businesses considered the implementation of the students’ solutions.

Our 10-day journey began with interviewing strangers to understand the target demographic of the students’ client. I was part of the Toys R Us group, so we went out to Toys R Us to interview and empathize with the pain points of “our” customers. While some of my peers were quite timid at first, a few garnered the confidence to approach strangers for an…