On 10th January 43 schools throughout the country embarked on The B!G Idea programme. Including over 80 teachers and over 2000 students from 22 counties across Ireland they are begining their journey to B!G Ideas that will change our world. Running for 16 weeks and will finish in style in May with a grand finale Showcase event to celebrate all our students. The bespoke weekly classes are delivered to our teachers every Friday via our Teacher Dashboard, they include a Presentation (which includes a Lesson Explainer video, discussing the topic of the week) and a Lesson Plan to guide the teachers. We like to practice what we preach so we try to keep everything as straightforward and as simple for our teachers; between pandemics and freezing cold classrooms they have enough on their plates.

The award-winning lessons include a variety of material to bring out the best in our students, designed for all learning styles we use various pieces from the Swag bags (more on that later) and encourage lots and lots of team work activities.

Each week students work through the stages of the creative process, as they respond to their chosen B!G Idea brief.
They learn new skills which will help them to move their initial B!G Idea from concept to a proposed solution. This includes learning how to break down and understand a problem, how to ideate, how to fail safely and build resilience, how to develop their idea and finally how to communicate their B!G solution.

The classes are jam-packed and full of fun. They are challenging but in a head-scratching kind of way rather than a heart attack over trying to remember reams of text kind of way. The B!G Idea is all inclusive and so every student receives a Swag Bag which is full of all the goodies needed for each class. These goodies include a t-shirt, sellotape, Lego glasses, bags of Lego and post-it notes. The programme is also designed to appeal to all learning abilities so everyone has equal opportunity.

The programme allows students to have a platform to communicate their opinions and to propose viable solutions. We hope that each and every one of the students undertaking the programme this year finds it interesting, motivating and rewarding. We hope that the teachers get a little of this as well and that they enjoy the experience of teaching it. 2022 we’ll be having you!!