Students make their mark in the marketplace
The best lesson awaiting secondary school students in running a Lunar New Year's stall is learning how hard it is to make a dollar, according to a teacher at the Victoria Shanghai Academy.
Students from the school will be running a business at the Lunar New Year Fair for the first time this year, selling yellow and orange dragons that can be worn as hats. They hope the amusing, eye-catching product will entice young people to loosen their purse strings.
Alric Chong Kumhwang, a business management teacher at the school, said the students would gain valuable business acumen.
'The concept of earning HK$100 is foreign to them; even the concept of making a profit was new. But now they understand what it means to set a price, how much stock to order, when to restock - and then they will see that HK$100 is difficult to make.'
The Year 12 design technology students are working on the project as part of their International Baccalaureate (IB) score, and the Year 11 business students are doing it in preparation for their IB assessment next year.
All profits will go to the international aid group Heifer Hong Kong.
The entire school will mobilise to support the stall during the week of the fair. From January 17 to the early morning of the 23rd, all students in Years 7 to 10 will drop in and help promote its products.
Ronald Tang Hou-chiu said: 'We had to learn to manage time, because every step in planning is time-sensitive. By a certain time, we needed to have contacted the suppliers; and by a certain time we needed to have the products delivered.'
Students from the Hong Kong Tang King Po College will also be trying their hand at running a Lunar New Year Fair stall for the first time.
Among other items, they will be selling a pencil case and pencils that look like Chinese fortune sticks and their traditional bamboo container. The pencils are engraved with the names of universities and academic subjects.
Perry Leung Ting-fung, a Form Five student and chairman of the organising committee, said: 'The biggest challenge of being the first group in our school to run the fair is that we don't have any contacts with suppliers established already, so we had to start from scratch.'
He said their product range was targeting students facing the new secondary school system. Short videos were made to promote their products in the build-up to the fair.
