New Hope High seniors face off in ‘Shark Tank’-inspired challenge

LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – High school seniors at New Hope learned what it’s like to be on the hit show Shark Tank.

Instead of a celebrity panel of judges, the panel included local industrial leaders in the surrounding areas.

Students got together in teams and tried to solve real-world problems using advanced technology.

Sarah Oswalt is the manager at Flex Factor at the East Mississippi Community College in Mayhew.

She said the project gave students an opportunity to put the phone down and pick up communication skills.

“In our present time, I really feel like our students live on social media and they don’t have that face-to-face contact or communication with people. This has given them a chance to really work through a whole project or a whole product from start to finish. So they had to come up with the design and the ideas themselves. They had to do the research. And then they also had to present it to the public or to our industry leaders, and really practice those entrepreneurial skills,” said Oswalt.

Oswalt said every product students pitched was focused on flexible, hybrid electronics.

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