Do Hong Kong schools squeeze out have-a-go spirit? Why city lags behind China and America in entrepreneurship

With a slick, professional-looking slideshow, 12-year-old Brian Cheng Han-chen and his three "business" partners are pitching the app they have developed over the past two weeks.

They rattle off a series of figures - the number of domestic helpers in Hong Kong and the percentage who have experienced different forms of abuse - and explain how employment agencies exploit the workers. The children are hoping to alleviate these problems with Helpchat, "a platform for questions and answers for domestic helpers".

Brian's Team Dragon is pitching to Team Abbie, another group of four aged between 12 and 16 years old; they are all participating in a two-week boot camp at the First Code Academy, a computer programming school in Wan Chai for young students, which has set them the challenge of designing an app to help prevent domestic helper exploitation in Hong Kong .

To achieve their task, they were taught to use design thinking, a framework for creative problem solving which advocates a strict process: empathise, define, ideate, design a prototype and test.

"This course has taught me how to look at a problem from different angles. It's told me that crazy ideas aren't necessarily bad ones," says Cheng, who is going into the eighth grade at the ISF Academy, in Pok Fu Lam, and has been teaching himself how to code since he was seven.

Across the harbour on the same afternoon, there's a camp for high school students at the Polytechnic University's Institute for Entrepreneurship. About 20 students, split into groups of five, are gathered in a classroom for a "creativity lab". Their task: stage a short theatrical interpretation of the lyrics of a Canto-pop song. At their disposal are items such as chairs, plastic bags and buckets.

William Chan Wai-lam, 19, and his group ponder how best to portray the idea of time and change as imagined in Eason Chan Yik-shun's Tourbillon.