Before deciding on your final idea and creating anything, you have to find out:

• Is the product or service useful?
• Does it actually solve a problem of your clients?
• Who is our client?

This session helps you and your teammates to define and clarify your idea, and if needed modify it according to new information, and start moving towards a solution in the form of a product or service.

In the next sessions we will go through first three steps of design thinking methodology: empathize (learn about your audience), define (combine all your research and observe where your client`s problems exist), and ideate (generate a range of crazy, creative ideas).

Your team has contacted a mentor (Guidelines for the first letter to the mentor), and hopefully, during these weeks you will get confirmation from the mentor to work with your team and initial feedback to your startup´s idea and logic.

Start working with the idea based on the common theme and problem you chose with your team.

First mentor meeting

First mentor meeting with the team is about getting to know each other and to talk about your ways of communication. By that time, students have finished the session “Distance communication in international teams” and agreed on their team rules and ways of communication.

In order to support the first meeting, there are some topics you should cover during the meeting:

• Let the team members introduce themselves to you. Also, talk about yourself, including your work experience, your interests, and the reason why you joined DigiYouth programme as a mentor.
• Ask the students introduce their idea or the topic of interest. How far are they with the idea? How clear it is? Do they need help with forming or narrowing the idea? Should it be more specific? Note that the teams have time until Christmas to explore and specify their idea – to research their customer, to learn about the market (competition) and to research the technology needed to implement the idea.
• Make an agreement on your channel of communication with the team and the time of the next meeting.

You may also talk about other topics, but the ones mentioned should be covered during the meeting.

What do we expect from the mentors?

Experienced business people and experts help students to grow. DigiYouth student startups will benefit from regular interactions with successful entrepreneurs from the DigiYouth network.

As a DigiYouth mentor or Expert you can:

• help transform the education system so that the school can prepare children and young for the uncertain future.
• Help us to make learning more exciting, more motivating for the students
• introduce your company or field. And why not-find future trainee or worker!
• DigiYouth is not a one-off project – we work closely with schools and mentors to find a way to put this DigiYouth collaborative learning process into curriculums.

Mentorship – is a special partnership between two people based on commitment to the mentoring process, common goals and expectations, focus, mutual trust and respect. Mentoring can also encompass activities that allow for transfer of knowledge and skills.
Every student startup will get a personal mentor for the development period (1.5 years- or at least one semester). Mentors role is to support the team-leader and the team. Mentor helps the student start-up by supporting the team with his entrepreneurial experience, motivating and directing team to seek information or find alternative perspectives or solutions to their problems.

Network of Experts – will give every team a content knowledge and help them overcome digital difficulties they might concur during the development period. An expert is a specialist in a digital field (e.g. 3D, game design, programming, hi-tech art & craft) who helps a student starter in his field to overcome a specific problem. The expert supports a student starter for a single or longer period of time. When the students overcome the developmental problem, the expert falls back and the startup will continue to work with the help of a teacher and mentor.

During this session you will learn:

• how to get the best possible understanding of the problem and your target group needs?
• what are their experiences and motivations?
• what is their environment like?
• how to explore different aspects of the problem you are dealing with, and how to define a problem?
• how to generate as many different ideas as possible to solve the problem you have defined?
• how to choose the one product or service idea your team would like to work with?