West Ferris students share their digital knowledge

A group of West Ferris High School students got a glimpse at the future while helping find business solutions for a local business. 

The 40 plus students from the local high school gathered at the iCamp location on Canadore College’s Commerce Court campus where they used their digital knowledge to come up with innovative digital platform ideas to suggest to Nathan and John Serran, the owners of Sugar Daddy Cupcakes and Catering. 

“We brought them in and the sector partner, he came and spoke about the nature of the business and some of the challenges that their business has been facing in recent months,”  stated Karen Bond, the Business Program Lead at West Ferris Secondary School.  

“So it is a real-world authentic challenge that a local startup has been facing, students heard from him, asked a lot of questions about those challenges and then we set them loose on an Innovation, Creativity, Entrepreneurship (ICE) training-thinking process to come up with innovative solutions to meet those challenges they are facing. 

The groups of four put their ideas together and presented ideas that could help the business in the future.  

The one-day event continued where students learned about coding from local Apple certified instructors and a local business called Hard Hat Hunters. 

This one-day event is part of a requirement for the Specialist High Skills Major  (SHSM) program, as the students have to go through a sector-partner contextualized learning opportunity.

Bond says this is a valuable learning tool and she believes schools need to do a better job now to prepare students for the jobs that do not even exist yet. 

“One of our instructors today told the students about 60 percent of the students who are in about grade 2 or 3, when they get out into the workforce they will be having some form of employment that will be orientated towards the digital world, digital technology of some sort,” Bond said about digital learning.  

Bond says the event went over extremely well and next year they hope to expand the learning opportunity to two days.