Three edutainment prototypes in eight weeks

“This is the first time I’ve seen anyone reference a techno DJ on LinkedIn - and make it relevant”

That was the first time I encountered Ivan Cestero. I’d just posted a riff about how the international DJ and record label owner John Digweed had got his career start. Ivan saw it (thanks, algorithm) and got in touch.

Over the following months, we had a bunch of energizing conversations covering the future of education, career-connected learning, entrepreneurship… and yes, electronic music.

During this time, Ivan started a new role at Portal Schools. Portal is on a mission to revolutionize the future of school to dramatically impact the pursuit of happiness and economic mobility for the next generation.

Their network of micro schools delivers high school, college and career immersion all in one place, and each micro school houses no more than 60 students per campus.

The challenge

As part of their career-connected learning initiative, Ivan and his team wanted students to practice complex problem solving and gain insight into professional practice.

They spun up Portal Consults: immersive design challenges with local and global industry partners. Working from custom briefs, student teams would use design thinking and entrepreneurship tools to develop and present solutions, documenting their process along the way.

Having explored our Edutainment 3.0 trend report, Ivan sensed an exciting opportunity to bring students into the world of edutainment. Would we like to become an industry partner?

Design thinking? Career-connected learning? Scenario challenges? Edutainment? Empowering young people? Using Derek Sivers' decision-making framework, this one was a Hell, Yes.

What we built

The list of partners was impressive:

• Belkin, which hosts Portal’s campus
• boutique creative agencies in LA and London
• an international NGO
• a major university
• a major social media company
• ed tech startups
• a film director

Oh yeah, and us.

Over a few weeks, we worked with Ivan to co-create a brief for the students, based on our Edutainment 3.0 report but applying its insights to the real world.

This was harder than it looked. We needed to find the balance between simplicity and ease of access, for a group of young people who hadn’t done a project like this before, and enough depth to make the project interesting and challenging. It turned out V4 of our Google Doc was the one.

We pulled out key insights and case studies from the report (listed at the end), framed them around two trends, Brands as Educators and Tackling Wicked Problems, and used H&M as our sample client.

Our provocation:

How might we use edutainment to highlight what comes after fast fashion, and present this to a brand like H&M?

How it ran

Over four weeks, student teams worked on the brief, following a design thinking process from research to presenting.

Each team had to deliver both a prototype of their solution and an 8-minute presentation to the rest of the class, their teachers and the pro partners.

Each week, we worked with our student team to guide them through the process, answer their (very good) questions, coach them on challenges they were facing, and give creative direction and feedback on their ideas.

Pitch day

Tuning in on Zoom, we were nervous and excited when our team went up to pitch. They seemed relaxed. We were probably more nervous than they were.

They hadn’t shared their final concepts with us beforehand, and we got more than one surprise. All three of these were produced in less than two weeks:

1. Prototype 1A trivia gamePlayed live at the pitch.
2. Prototype 2An appA prototype, demoed at the pitch.
3. Prototype 3A TV news showA fully produced edutainment news show.

What shifted

As with any design thinking process, where we ended up looked very different from where we started. We couldn’t help but notice how both the ideas and the students grew along the way.

Students and the Portal team both reported a significant uplift in what Portal measures as “Creative Confidence”. We’ve already got plans to extend the project into a second phase, and to bring students in to help us take the Edutainment 3.0 report into new terrain.

Lucky I posted that riff about John Digweed…

The case studies we shared

Some of the best-in-class examples from the report:

• GoHenry, a UK bank for teenagers: a cash app plus financial education. Edutainment: customizable in-app lessons about investing, credit and budgeting, with gamified dynamics.
• Miss Excel, a TikTok teacher sharing tips and tricks on using Excel more effectively. Edutainment: humor and high-energy presenting that make a dense topic fun and engaging.
• Skam, a teen drama critically acclaimed for its handling of issues like homophobia, sexual assault and mental illness, layering content across multiple formats and platforms. Edutainment: narrative, storytelling and character development, for greater empathy.
• NikeLab x Virgil Abloh, the NikeLab Re-Creation Center in Abloh’s hometown of Chicago, which offered free creative workshops for local youth and eight-week mentorships for 10 creatives. Edutainment: brands as neo-educators, giving audiences a behind-the-scenes look at their business through active learning (workshops), an immersive experience (access to a design studio) and experts from a wide range of fields. It sits where marketing, innovation and active learning meet.
• Garnier x National Geographic: Garnier’s Green Beauty launched an educational campaign dedicated to sustainable consumption. Edutainment: co-created content with high production value, on topics central to Garnier’s commitment to sustainability.

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