Sixth year pupil Eve Hart writes a guest blog about Culloden Inspire, the Young Enterprise team from Culloden Academy, and tells us about the innovative products they’ve developed. 

Young Enterprise is a charity set up to allow sixth year pupils to set up a business. There’s a large team this year, with twenty one members. We have two products; Go Explore, a children’s card game, and StressLess; a box filled with things designed to stress less and live more. We decided to produce two products because it allows us to create a greater impact on mental health and well-being by reaching out to all stages of life.

Culloden Inspire, the Young Enterprise team from Culloden Academy

Go Explore aims to get children out of the house; to get their minds working and inspire them to connect and engage with the beautiful natural surroundings that we are so lucky to have, and often take for granted. We also hope that this product will reduce the time that children spend sitting inside and on technology, encouraging them to get active. This is particularly significant given that childhood obesity is such a growing and important issue in Scotland, and across the UK.

Go Explore aims to get children out of the house and be more active

Whilst it can be played alone, the game also works very well when played among friends, even as a competition; this will help children develop essential social skills. We hope the game will bring families together as children can play with their parents/guardians/ grandparents, and positive family relationships will be encouraged. It will also promote outdoor sensory development by discovering many new sights, sounds and natural physical objects.

By creating a game that can fit in anyone’s pocket, can be played anywhere outside, and is affordable, we believe it is accessible to all children and families. We’ve visited local primary schools and the feedback we’ve received has been extremely helpful. From this we’ve developed two new editions – GoExplore Woods edition and GoExplore Winter edition. For the Christmas gift market, we know this is the perfect stocking filler!

The products are ideal stocking fillers

Stress Less is a box filled with things to help people “stress less and live more”, incorporating a variety of locally sourced products from four key areas, aimed to help improve mental health, well-being and promote a positive mindset. These areas are ‘relaxation’, ‘organisation’, ‘well-being’ and ‘mindfulness’. Given that mental health among young people, particularly in the Highlands, is an increasingly prevalent issue, we feel our product will raise awareness of this. Furthermore, 15.8 billion working days are lost each year in the UK as a result of mental health and the cost of poor mental health to the UK economy is estimated to be between £70-100 billion each year. As this product is aimed at an older demographic in comparison with Go Explore, we hope our product can really make a difference within this area. We believe this product would also be ideal for the Christmas gift market as many people look to start the new year with a fresh, positive outlook, and Stress Less provides the perfect opportunity to do that.

Promotion during the festive season

We’ve really focused on promotion through our social media channels – a great way to reach out to the community and local businesses.

From creating and running our own business we’ve discovered the difficulties and the triumphs of going through the process and we hope to continue progressing and developing in the coming months.

For further information contact cullodeninspire@gmail.com or take a look @cullodeninspire on Instagram and Facebook.

Culloden Inspire