Young Enterprise Scheme links
Level: Year 13
School: Hastings Girls' High School
Teacher: Karen Cowley
In 2009 Karen Cowley ran a successful project with her Year 13 Food Technology class working within the Young Enterprise Scheme in which a group of students created a company to develop a product using berry products given to them by the Heinz/Wattie's factory. See Techlink Student Showcase Berry burst ice-cream topping.
In this Teaching Snapshot we look at the development of that programme in 2010 where Karen facilitated a much larger group of girls with the Young Enterprise Scheme but with an entirely different client and brief. The students' outcome – a kiwifruit sauce - solved a major issue for producers of kiwifruit products as they managed to keep the kiwifruit's natural green colour in the preserving process.
Preparation
Karen's preparation for the class was in facilitating contact between the students, the client and the Young Enterprise Trust, and industry mentors, to ensure the students were properly introduced to the scheme and the people with whom they would be communicating and working. With her regular client Heinz Watties unexpectedly unavailable in 2010, Karen had a few short weeks to find a new client before classes began, eventually finding a small local producer of preserved foods that she thought would a good match for the challenge.
Delivery
After consultation with their client the girls came up with their brief – to create a luxury food product using kiwifruit, to be sold at the farmer's market toward the end of the year – and set about the process to create a product while also taking on the extra challenge of the Young Enterprise scheme.
"What I realised last year was that it's a twofold thing," says Karen. "You've got the Young Enterprise stuff where the students set up their company, do some fundraising and set up meetings; then alongside that they are involved in their Technological Practice – researching the company, potential customers and looking into the product and its history," Karen explains.
The first step for the girls was to conduct a large series of trials using a variety of ideas, working with kiwifruit as a base ingredient. Karen feels that a key difference between this and the previous unit was having six students instead of two, which gave the students more options.
"This meant they could trial a really wide range of kiwifruit products and take one section each, experimenting with salsas, marinades, drinks bases, jams and sauces all using kiwifruit. They kept trialling and testing these as a group, and on a small number of potential customers, until they decided that the sauce was something that they wanted to concentrate on," Karen says.
Eventually the students narrowed their sauces down to two flavours they thought got the best response in their sensory trials – one plain kiwifruit and the other a kiwifruit and raspberry mix – and then had to choose one to develop further.
"The raspberry had a pink colour to it and the kiwifruit sauce was fairly brown. So, while it didn't look great, they eventually chose the kiwifruit sauce as long they could get a good green colour on it so that it looked fairly attractive. Choosing the single fruit product was partly a financial thing because raspberries are quite an expensive ingredient but it also fitted the original brief more."
Being a seasonal fruit, kiwifruit prices fluctuate over the year. To keep expenses down, and hopefully solve the issues with maintaining the colour at the same time, the girls decided to trial different ways of preparing and preserving the kiwifruit while it was at a favourable price.
The student's trialled a few methods such as freezing the kiwifruit whole but found that while the fruit maintained its flavour it still went brown soon after being prepared. Headway was eventually made when the girls started experimenting with different fruit juicing machines to create a liquid kiwifruit stock.
"They used some different juicers because one of them turned out a juice that went brown very quickly and another one kept the colour much better. I think that was down to the physical way that the machines worked and how much oxygen they put into the mix – the more oxygen the quicker it went brown. So they identified that this juicing process was what made a difference as to whether they were able to keep the colour or not," Karen explains.
With the colour issue solved the students could then focus on the consistency and flavour of the product, experimenting with boiling down the sauce and adding a variety of different thickeners and flavourings such as arrowroot and citric acid. This also helped maintain the bright green colour the girls wanted without the use of colourings or preservatives.
The teacher's role
Karen feels that a major benefit of the subject of Technology and of the Young Enterprise Scheme is the sense of ownership they both encourage in students with the work they do. To help with this, Karen sees her role as one of a facilitator and tries to give the students as much freedom, and responsibility, as possible. Within that role, her biggest challenge is to find the right balance of teacher intervention to ensure the project stays on target.
"Basically it has to be what the students want it to be. They have a certain timeframe by which things have to be done, and I put some effort into creating those deadlines. But within that I try to give as much flexibility as I possibly can so they can see when things need to be done and recognise it for themselves. And that's a big part of what they are learning – how to use their time properly."
Outcomes
Karen is happy to report that on the day of the farmers market, the girls' stall proved to be the most successful in the history of the unit so far.
"They made quite a lot of money and one of the most positive things was that a local company who make hampers of Hawke's Bay products was interested in purchasing the product." Karen says. "They are currently in negotiation to buy the recipe from the girls and possibly continue to make it and put it in their hampers, so that's a big success story I think and it is absolutely what Technology and the Young Enterprise Scheme is all about."
RSS Feed
