Hello! Nick here. You may (or quite reasonably may not) have been wondering about all the Young Enterprise Cornwall and @WhereB2 tweets in our Twitter timeline over the past few months. To explain…
I’ve been business-mentoring a class of 15-year-old Year 10 students from our local Fowey River Academy, in a county-wide and eventually national Young Enterprise competition. The idea is to come up with a brilliant business idea, then take it to market. Not in a hypothetical way, but to make the product, set up an actual company, find shareholders, design, market, finance and sell the thing to complete strangers.
Our product, WhereB2, is an all-new Cornish card game based on Cornish towns and the syllables that make up their names. Where a standard deck of cards uses 13 runs of each of 4 suits, WhereB2 uses 13 towns each broken down into a namecard (eg, POLRUAN) and its three syllables (POL, RU and AN). So our pack of unique cards can be used with traditional card game rules. So far we have Honan (our version of solitaire and Romm (our rummy) in the rules, but we’re sure there are more.
It’s been hectic! The students only get one Wednesday morning a week to work on this (plus after-hours in the run-up to an event), when I’ve joined them to offer advice and get stuck in. It’s been great fun, I’ve loved getting to know the students and seeing them learn through the experience, but also pushing Fowey as a town within this fabulous county.
At last weekend’s Spring Trade Fair at the Eden Project – sadly I was away and couldn’t attend – team WhereB2 (having picked up just one award from two fairs) pulled in four awards, including the coveted Best Overall Company. A huge achievement, which had me dancing about the room (badly).
Just two more rounds to go, when the Best Overall Company winner gets to compete in the national version of the competition. So there’s still all to play for. I’ll keep you posted via Twitter…
