The Future of Our Regions Design Challenge: The Why, What and How

Our Future of Our Regions Youth Design Challenge is a great way to build your students' confidence, resilience, and general capabilities and encourages them to view problems as opportunities through a social enterprise lens. 

Young Change Agents runs national design thinking challenges for young people that focus on a specific theme and take students through empathy, ideation, validation, and prototyping. Students then explore the problem, conduct empathy interviews, and develop, validate, prototype, and pitch a solution.

This is a teacher-led program where students gain an appreciation of some of our biggest regional challenges, such as Connection, Resilience, Career Opportunities, Health, Food Growth and Production & First Nations. Students explore through a design thinking approach, how to make more meaningful connections and develop their social enterprise to tackle a problem they are passionate about. 

Join this 90-minute professional development workshop to bring the Future of Our Regions Design Challenge to your classroom. It will be an interactive, immersive opportunity where you will gain an understanding of:

- Why: introduce design challenges into your school context as well as why the Future of Our Regions is an important topic to engage our young people

- What: discuss the Young Change Agents national design challenges, the content, the resources, the process, and timeframes to run the program 

- How: introduce examples and case studies of incorporating this into your classroom and curriculum, based on learning areas and cross-curriculum priority links. How you can get your students excited by introducing the national challenge, prizes, and different ways of learning.  

- Who: possibilities of collaborating internally to co-deliver the program and what ages/class sizes suit best 

Ready to take on the challenge and support your students with creative ideas for our Future of Our Regions Youth Design Challenge? Ready to support your students to change the world?

Design Challenge Sub Themes: 

1. Connection: How might we improve digital and physical connection in regional Australia to strengthen communities?
2. Resilience: How might we make our regions more resilient to disasters?
3. Career Opportunities: How might we create accessible, future-focused employment opportunities that keep young people in the regions?
4. Health: How might we improve access to quality healthcare in regional Australia?
5. Food Growth and Production: How might we improve the lives of farming families & communities?
6. First Nations: How might we celebrate and preserve First Nations culture in our regions?

FOR EDUCATORS: 

You can then access the resources to run this challenge with your students over the semester or as an incursion with national prizes and awards for students who enter and become finalists in the challenge. Attending this event will allow you to be immersed in a Young Change Agents Youth Design Challenge which you can then deliver within your school. Young Change Agents provides the resources, facilitator guides, curriculum, and support needed to embed this program. More information here: https://youngchangeagents.com/challenges/future-regions-youth-design-challenge/