Entrepreneurship Challenge: Build a Restaurant

At Acton Academy Columbus, real-world challenges are an important part of our curriculum. This includes STEM / STEAM activities, Engineering challenges, Coding / Robotics, and Entrepreneurship.

Our latest Quest was “Around the World.”

This exhibition focused on cartography and places around the world. Our Eagles worked independently on their online research skills, learned new presentation skills, built a foreign restaurant and made real money, and had a blast participating in activities from around the world: Making origami, Building a Djembe Drum, building an Amazon rainforest home, playing Carrom, and making models of a lot of places we saw around the world.

Building the restaurant was a key part of this quest.

We broke into two teams and each team of Eagles had to decide what type of foreign restaurant they would open. In addition, we turned the clock back to March 2020 and asked the Eagles to build a vegetarian / vegan restaurant because there was a meat shortage.

The teams selected their restaurants: French Breakfast Cafe and a Japanese Dine-in Restaurant.

The learners started by building an agile project management board for their restaurant - a plan to figure out what to do and who would do what by when. From there, they focused on all the major aspects of setting up an actual restaurant:

  • Menu

  • Prices / cost

  • Interior Design / Decor

  • Marketing

  • Food to make

  • Purchases to make - plates, napkins, utensils

  • Creating receipts for customers

Building a business requires bringing a lot of components together. Our learners focused on this for several weeks before getting everything finalized.

Then the grand opening came.

The menus were set, the food was made, and the customers started coming in.

The learners figured out each person’s role - cashier, server, greeter - and served every family that walked in. They had enough food but not too much (excellent planning!) and each team made ~$50 each.

These are the building blocks of entrepreneurship. They will help our learners prepare for the big Children’s Business Fair on June 4, 2022.

Varun Bhatia