Do your challenge
Do your challenge
Challenge awards are made up of 6 key areas:
- Discover -> learning
- Experience -> doing
- Mobilise -> working with others
- Solve -> overcoming challenges
- Create -> making something
- Reflect -> Looking back at what you have achieved
These don’t need to be separate activities and you don’t need to plan all of them at the start. Focus on one or two when planning your challenge and you’ll likely find that the others happen along the way.
Discover
Discover is about being curious and noticing what you’re learning.
Before you start
Before starting your challenge, you might want to think about:
What questions do you hope you’ll answer?
What do you want to try that you’ve not done before?
What scares you about this challenge?
What’s unknown about this challenge?
As you go
As you complete your challenge, you will likely discover along the way. Note down as you go:
- What you learned
- What was new to you
- What surprised you
- What you looked up, asked, or explored
Experience is about what actually happened, not just what you planned.
You could capture:
- what happened
- how it felt
- what went well / didn’t
- a highlight moment
- firsts
- things that felt hard
- things that surprised you
Mobilise is about bringing people along with you and making a difference.
That could be a big group or just one other person.
Before you start
To mobilise, you could:
- Volunteer
- Create a resource for people
- Create something that will inspire others
- Send letters to people of influence such as your MP
- Run sessions for a community
As you go
You might think about:
- who you worked with
- who helped you
- who you helped
- how you got people involved
- what difference that made
During your challenge, have you...
- Asked for help?
- Stepped up?
- Let someone else lead?
- Worked as part of a team?
- Met someone new?
Solve is about dealing with problems and adapting when things don’t go to plan. This doesn’t have to be a big problem, small challenges count too.
Every challenge has at least one moment where you think:
“Okay… now what?”
This could be:
- something that didn’t go to plan
- a decision you had to make
- a compromise
- a last minute fix
- A problem you learned about when doing other parts of the project
That moment is important, reflect on it:
- What was the problem?
- What did you do next?
- What would you do differently another time?
Create is anything that exists because of your challenge. This can be something simple, it doesn’t have to be big or polished.
You might create:
- an object
- a plan
- a resource
- something digital
- something creative
Reflect is about looking back on your challenge and recognising what you gained from it.
After your challenge
- Take some time to think about the whole journey. You might consider:
- What you’re most proud of
- What you would do differently next time
- How you’ve changed or grown
- What skills you developed
- What you achieved (big or small)
- How you felt at the end compared to the beginning
You could reflect on:
- What you enjoyed most
- What challenged you the most
- What surprised you about yourself
- What you learned about working with others
- What you learned about the topic or activity
- How this experience might influence what you do next
Looking forward
Reflection isn’t just about the past, it can help shape what’s next:
- Would you do something similar again?
- What would you take further?
- Is there something new you now want to try?
- How could you build on what you’ve started?
What to focus on
- Helping Explorers notice what they are already doing
- Using the model as a lens, not a checklist
- Encouraging reflection in natural moments
What to avoid
- Asking Explorers to “tick off” all five areas
- Forcing activities to fit categories artificially
- Treating sections as separate tasks
How you can support
- Use light prompts:
- “What did you learn from that?” (Discover)
- “Who else was involved?” (Mobilise)
- “Did anything not go to plan?” (Solve)
- Help them see overlap:
- one activity may cover multiple areas