We here at the DEN are all about giving back to the students of Clemson and our local community. We participate in several local outreach events each semester with the goal of sharing our knowledge of design thinking, entrepreneurship, and the business mindset. Our audience varies widely, from the business elite to elementary students and everyone in between.

One of the first events we attended this year was the Engineering Expo, hosted right here in the Hendrix Center. This day is all about promoting engineering disciplines and ideals to the next generation, in this case a group of about 250 second graders from the surrounding area. We hosted an activity that introduced the children to ideas such as designing with a customer in mind, building a product as a team, and how to iterate upon each others ideas. The expo was a blast, and is held each year by Clemson’s Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.

This year we once again participated in Greenville’s iMAGINE Upstate Festival, a day long festival for companies, schools, and groups to promote STEM, entrepreneurial and innovative activity happening right here in South Carolina. The DEN hosted a booth where we demonstrated prototyping and rapid iteration methods to parents and their children. We saw of ton of great ideas from local elementary and middle schoolers, and were excited to hear many of them planned on attending Clemson when they grow up! The festival was a huge success and a ton of fun. Check it out at imagineupstate.org.

This year the DEN was invited to be a key activity host for TEDx Greenville, with the theme of Impact. Our goal was to show how one person might have a significant effect through entrepreneurship and innovation. Our activity had participants empathize, build, and refine. The empathize portion had people sharing the problems their loved ones face in everyday life, but that they believed they had no power to solve – or so they thought. The next portion utilized design thinking to allow a third participant to build a solution to a stranger’s major problem. The final section had the original problem-presenter test the solution and iterative upon the existing piece to come up with a workable solution. Overall the experience was incredible for both our team and those who visited our booth, and hope to continue this partnership in the future. Check out the Greenville TEDx crew at tedxgreenville.com.