Kapolei High School GEER Final Report

In February of 2022, three seniors from different career academies at Kapolei High School reached out to the local organization, Lanakila Pacific, to inquire how they could support their organization. After their initial meeting with Mr. James Li, Program Manager for Lanakila Pacific Meals on Wheels, they learned that a new virtual learning platform designed for Hawaii's Kupuna was in the ideation stage of product development. Thus, a GEER Grant project was born!  For the next four months, these students focused on helping the organization answer their project's essential question, "How do we create a multi-channel marketing campaign that will motive our Kupuna of all technology-proficiency levels to use this website, participate in sponsored activities, and ultimately develop a sense of belonging?"  Using elements of the Design Thinking process, the team reached out to kupuna from various communities to understand their views on using technology, frustrations, successes, and current needs related to using devices such as smartphones, computers, and tablets. The students created target audience profiles of kupuna who would be using this new platform and shared their findings with the product designers. These students created possible logos for the platform with the help of two additional students from the school's graphic program.  With the help of students from the graphics program, the team created potential logo designs for the new virtual platform, appropriately named Kupuna University.

1. Students from different career Academies at KHS were able to collaborate on a community project, which had never been done before.  Students were able to take the knowledge they acquired from their CTE courses and apply it to this project.
2. In the video testimonies from the students, they shared that their inner confidence was built in regard to public speaking and hosting virtual meetings.  Because they designed the meeting agendas, and slides, and facilitated the discussions throughout the project, by the end, this skillset became second nature to them and their confidence in themselves grew.
3. The kids were fortunate to work with a caring and supportive organization, Lanakila Pacific-Meal on Wheels Division.  They provided positive and constructive feedback to the students throughout the semester regarding their research, product designs, as well as their presentation skills

1. At the school level, one of the challenges was finding times for students to collaborate because they were members of different career Academies.  None of the students had the same “off period” so collaboration happened before school time or after school time.  
2. At times, supporting the students in the selected EC Course was  tough.  At Kapolei HS, we provide our students with Chromebooks and Google Suite.  For the ICS 101 course, students required use of the Microsoft Suite, which our students were unable to access on their Chromebooks.  Thus, there were times when we panicked trying to get our students the appropriate devices and programs needed for the EC course.  In the end, it was a collaborative effort with our Tech Dept who honestly went above and beyond helping us navigate the several technical difficulties related to the UH Professor not knowing the limited capabilities of our students’ devices.

This project has allowed us to create various opportunities on approaching a problem/need and solving it. In addition, it helped us realize to see from a different perspective when it comes to advertising for a target market such as the Kupuna. It also made us put ourselves in their shoes to use a market strategy that would attract them to this online platform.  Also, an interesting discovery that was made was being able to collaborate with my mentor/team to provide results to this project.   Collaboration hasn’t always been the easiest thing to achieve with our high school classmates because juggling various priorities and responsibilities get in the way of collaboration.  However, each week we were productive and we loved how we were able to finish the task at hand in each meeting we had. With that being said, this project allowed us to stay motivated so we could be able to produce quality work while working as a team.