Armed with rhinestones, a hot glue gun and a ton of motivation, a group of Derby Middle School students experienced what it’s like to bring a product to the market this year.
A group of girls in English teacher Jennifer Andrews’ class this year participated in “genius hour.”
It’s a program Andrews adopted from Google. The company allows its engineers to spend 20 percent of the work day working on a pet project of their choice.
At Google, the concept birthed Gmail and Google news.
In Andrews’ class, the sixth-grade girls decided to make cell phone cases to sell in the Derby Middle School store, and to donate 50 percent of any profits to the Hewitt Center for Breast Wellness at Griffin Hospital.
The cases were sold for $5 each. The project launched in April.
Derby Middle School student Natalie Perruccio said her grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer eight years ago.
“I remember I went to all her chemotherapies and … I wanted to learn more about it and so I started researching it,” Natalie said.
One by one other members of the “genius hour” named relatives that survived cancer, are living with the disease, or died from it.
So they called their project “Cases for Cures.”
Decorated with stickers, rhinestones, and the like, creating the cases involved a lot of hard lessons. Certain paints didn’t stick to the cases. Burns from hot glue were common.
The girls ended the school year feeling accomplished. They said they learned more about themselves and each other.
“As a group we learned a lot together,” Natalie said. “So I feel like we’re a little family.”
Genius hour was a great experience for the students, Andrews said.
“(The program) is also a learning experience about life,” the teacher said. “You might want to pursue something and you fall flat on your face, but that’s part of the growing pains to be successful in life. ”
And now the students hope they’ve created a new tradition in a school district with many.
“We were planning on doing this from sixth to eighth grade and when we leave the school we’re probably going to get sixth-graders to carry it on,” said middle school student April Nowinski.
