Projects

STARLY

STARLY is an educational entrepreneurship project about resilience education for Chinese youth. It seeks to develop a roadmap for teenagers to adapt to life challenges and grow even stronger than before. In addition, it creates the opportunity for teenagers to accept new ideas, frustration, and cognitions through experience, thereby promoting their self-growth. There are 3 main actions: reflect, connect, apply.

People

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Xinyue Ruan

Seonhyo Kim

Deepu James

ABOUT

Entrepreneurship Self-initiated

Reseilience Education for Chinese Teeangers

Starly is an educational entrepreneurship project about resilience education for Chinese youth to cope with the pressures of their daily life. Our vision is to develop a roadmap for Chinese teenagers to adapt to life challenges and grow even stronger than before. To achieve that vision, we build out our strategy by creating a series of activities to connect teenagers to access the tools and all those different kinds of materials to trigger their reflection, and, in addition, establishing a community for them to support each other. Our mission is to create an opportunity for teenagers to accept new ideas, frustration, and cognitions through experience, thereby promoting their self-growth. This is done so through 3 main actions: reflect, connect, apply.

Why resilience education?

‘Gao kao’ is China’s life-changing, career-defining, nerve-wracking and all-important national college entrance examination. It has been criticised for relying on rote learning and not considering character strengths. Therefore, most of the teenagers have low awareness about resilience but they still suffer from a lot of pressure.Parents: With increased support from parents come high expectations. Parents understand that children are under increased pressure with an unclear goal, but they don’t know a proper ways to help children withstand the stress in this respect.Schools: It is a challenge for public schools to provide enough attention to each student due to the large student base and high educational demand. Also, instead of cultivating students’ soft skills and practical abilities, the school curricula focus more on learning.So how might we provide a roadmap for Chinese teenagers to enhance their resilience to support their self-growth?

What is Resilience?

Resilience is not a broad concept of nothingness and has specific and measurable dimensions and different meanings under different contexts. Furthermore, it may be popular in Western countries. However, it is still a relatively unknown field in China.So, under the suggestion of 2 Chinese experts, we define resilience as a combination of these 5 elements: goal focus, positive perception, emotional control, interpersonal assistance and family support, based on the educational context of Chinese youth.Resilience is more of a kind of ability and trait that determines how teens react to negative issues in life such as stress, disappointments and failures. Highly resilient teenagers are more likely to respond to adverse events healthily and sustainably. Unfortunately, teenagers with lower levels of resilience often fall into depression or anxiety.

Service System

We have built out our service system：For reflection thinking, experiential teaching methods to assess children get to know resilience through camps and workshops, which is our core service. For Application and connection help to raise people’s awareness of resilience. We create tools for teenagers and other touch-points. It focuses on supporting them to prepare for future difficulties, and apply them in their lives.

How do we bring resilience to life?

To bring our service system to the real world, we conducted a developing and prototyping session together with our potential customers, in a practical and experimental-led way.Level No.1: Camp preparation—In the form of a camp to get an in-depth understanding of the desire of parents and students to improve resilience.Level No.2: Experiential learning theory test—Most of the jam participants are practitioners and designers from the education industry.Level No.3: Resilience camp simulation—B2C form; students are recruited from cooperative educational institutions and high schools.Level No.4: Resilience workshop pilot in school—B2B form; cooperation with Psychological Counseling Department in Peiyuan Middle School, Quanzhou, Fujian, China.

How do we bring more value?

In the beginning, we will build a cohort of students and parents through offline activities. We know that is not the fastest way to grow a business. However, initial cash flow and strong customer trust relationships are the cornerstones of our expansion for an education start-up programme. After that, we'll convert the two patterns online. That's why we created so many digital touchpoints in the first place. Connect more city partners to become local youth resilience event organisers on our Resilience day which is on May 4th.May the resilient force be with you! People can register for our activities on the WeChat mini app. We will provide them with toolkits, an agenda and online guidance to help them conduct activities locally.

special thanks

Schools：
Quanzhou Peiyuan High School

Students：
Zuyan Tao
Yan Jiang
Xinyan Ruan
Guiyang Li
Runkai Zhuang
Yanzhang Zheng
Xiaoyan Zhuang
Routing Zhang
Zero
Yuqing Xi

Teachers：
Jingjing Zhuang
Wenbo Wang
Menghai Xia
Allen

Parents：
Mrs. Li
Mrs. Youqin Wu
Mrs. Ping Zi
Mrs.Xing Yue
Mrs. Hua Zhang

Photographer:
Huaibin You

Projects

STARLY

What is Resilience?

Service System

students involved on the project