Suppose you were entrusted with 60 of the best young minds in Canada. Full time, 24 hours a day, for a month.

You didn’t have to teach them anything in particular. Your sole mission was to challenge them and help them discover just how far they are capable of going, especially when they work together as a team.

That’s the incredible opportunity we have every year in the Shad Valley Summer Program for gifted teenagers.

This year was my 19th consecutive July with Shad, and in many ways the hardest ever because these kids are getting better and better. They already know all about computers; they’ve been debate champions and Model UN secretaries general.

Shad Valley student Peter Radford of Vernon, B.C., domonstrates the EcoCrunch prototype at the U of C.

So, in the precious one month that we have them with us, we help them to find out about themselves.

The University of Calgary was the second university (after Waterloo) to have a Shad Valley program.

It’s a unique summer camp that combines science, technology, entrepreneurship and personal growth in a highly motivating 24-hour-a-day format.

The idea has spread across the country, and even to a campus in the U.K. Shad Valley now has alumni who are doctors and lawyers, professors and researchers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a Catholic priest.

Many of them come back a decade later to tell us how much it meant, at the age of 17 or 18, to be challenged in a gruelling yet supportive way.

School just doesn’t push most of these kids, mainly because the educational system is geared to the average student. There are remedial programs for the ones who are falling behind, but the brightest ones are usually left to fend for themselves. If we push them a bit at just the right time, who knows what they can accomplish?

Our job in Shad Valley is to find out. We accomplish it with a gonzo team of 10 devoted staff, led by Dr. John Pliniussen of Queens University School of Business and myself. This year, our team included three twenty-something young consultants from Deloitte Consulting and the Boston Consulting Group in Toronto. They took all their vacation and mortgaged their time off to join us.

With such a powerhouse staff, and a great bunch of Shad students, we had an amazing month.

Essentially, we ask our Shads to do something that most adults would think is impossible. In less than a month, while busy doing lots of other things, they must come up with a never-before-done product or service and create a prototype and a viable business plan for it.

To focus their minds, we pick a theme each year, and all nine Shad campuses work on it. Two years ago, the focus was Crime Prevention, so we brought in Constables Gerry Bailey and Shalin Kashyap of the Calgary Police Service to brief them on crime.

Our Shads developed a pickpocket-proof credit card case, a new kind of snowboard lock and a newspaper box that dispenses only one copy at a time.

Last year, the theme was Aids for the Disabled. We saw everything from a walker that folds up so you can take it on the bus to a new kind of quick-turning wheelchair.

The top project from Calgary was Sky High, an innovative board game that’s fun for blind and sighted people. The game went on to win the RBC Shad Entrepreneurship Cup national competition, making Shad Calgary the reigning champion.

Winning Best Overall and several other categories, Calgary triumphed over Shad programs from UBC, Waterloo, McMaster, Carleton, etc.

This year, those Shad programs have vowed revenge. We’ll see.

The 2002 theme is The Environment, and it was probably the hardest ever, simply because so many great minds have focused on environmental products since the first Earth Day back in 1970.

We divide our 60 Shads into five houses, and my house thought they had a good idea. One girl had sewn
curtains with room for stuffing clothes inside, creating an extra level of insulation. Nice try, but they quickly found the same product for sale at www.cozycurtains.com.

The students went through a spate of possibilities, many of which were already being sold or had been recently patented.

Finally, somebody reminded the group about the mess of banana peels and juice boxes they had in their daypacks after our long hike in Waterton National Park.

“What about a bearproof trash compactor for hikers?”

A quick search on the Internet and a few calls to companies such as Mountain Equipment Co-op convinced them that it was a novel idea with at least some market potential.

They went on to build a prototype of the EcoCrunch out of PVC pipe, with a metal piston that crushes your trash. It’s a bit heavy (unless you’re training for an Everest climb), but they figure they can get it down to 280 grams.

Several of the students who worked on it are now carrying the idea forward, and with the increasing “pack in, pack out” ethic for outdoor users, the EcoCrunch’s time may well come.

You heard it here first.

Other ideas emerging from the Calgary group included a curbside composting pick-up service, a line of stuffed animals that speak environmental messages and a “dating service for waste” that matches companies with a by-product and companies that can use it.

An example is carbon dioxide, which is waste for some companies, but which is needed by soft drink manufacturers to carbonate their beverages.

The winning project from Calgary, which goes on to the national competition in Toronto in October, is a novel application of the Peltier effect to make electricity from waste heat.

One of the students lives near the Pickering nuclear power plant, and knew that heated water is poured into Lake Ontario. In theory, at least, that heat differential can be turned into electric power. The last time I looked
at their online discussion, they were trying to figure out if the heat from a car engine could be used to run air conditioning to save gas.

As I move into my 20th year with Shad Valley, I feel I’ve learned much more than I’ve taught, including:

* If you expect the impossible, you’ll probably get it.
* Sleep is optional when there’s a deadline looming.
* Give young people the right tools, then get out of their way.
* The future of Canada is very, very bright if we can hang on to these folks.

If you are, or you know, a bright Grade 11 or 12 student you owe it to them and to this country to point them to the website for Shad Valley. If they’re real Shad material, they’ll take it from there.

(Tom Keenan is dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education at the U of C. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)