There’s a saying popular amongst people who feel the need to belittle others to make themselves feel better: “Those who can’t do, teach.” This saying is wrong.

Teaching, it turns out, is pretty hard. You have to distill all the complexities, nuances, and things you just know to do without thinking into something straightforward and easy for other people to understand. The saying should be: “If you want to make sure you really know what you’re talking about, try to teach it.” 

This, of course, is far less pithy, less insulting, and therefore very unlikely to catch on.

This spring, I put my own teaching abilities to the test as part of the Roundhouse Innovation Academy, a course we created with our partners at the Roundhouse for young people aged 18-25. Through the Academy, we aimed to open up the digital agency world to people who might not have otherwise known (or cared) what we do and teach them new skills that would enable them to use digital creativity to help solve real world problems and hopefully change the world for the better. 

For the month long course, the attendees were split into small teams and given a challenge to tackle the ethical minefield that is cyber-harassment and online bullying. This is a pretty heavy subject for a series of Wednesday evenings, and it’s one that hits close to home for many of us, especially as technology becomes an increasingly inescapable part of our lives. 

I have to admit that I have very little personal experience with cyberbullying. I mostly avoid social media with the exception of an Instagram account I run for my dog (I don’t know when I became that person), where one could argue my role is closer to troll than trolled if the inflammatory captions didn’t appear to come from a fluffy, white puppy. 

Luckily though, any personal experiences I may or may not have had with the subject were completely beside the point. We weren’t there to provide the ideas; we were there to give this group of enviably motivated young people the tools to form, refine, and communicate their own ideas. 

The course itself was comprised of four evening sessions each, focused on a different stage within the process:

• Approaching briefs and brainstorming ideas to find the right type of solution
• Sketching and testing ideas to get audience feedback
• Prototyping and designing digital experiences to bring an idea to life
• Storytelling to help present and sell ideas

And it culminated in a final presentation day where the teams pitched the concepts they’d been working on to a panel of judges.

None of us, as far as I know, was deluded enough to think anyone could crack cyberbullying in four weeks, but the ideas presented were an amazing leap forward.

The concepts took completely different approaches to address the issue, ranging from giving people a way to create a safe space for their social media profiles where they were given the power to ban hateful language to a series of mini games to help people deal with negative online interactions through play. 

So yeah. Teaching is hard, but it’s also worth it, and not just because I can now more easily explain what I do for a living to my mum [No, mum, I still don’t work in IT. I don’t know how to make your printer work. Have you tried Googling it?]. 

Honestly, it’s worth it because it feels really nice to teach people something they can actually use to do some good in the world, to uh, “use the digital world to make the analog world better,” one might say (see what I did there?). 

And it’s worth it because if we’re lucky, maybe some of these guys (in the gender neutral sense of the word) might deign to work in our industry one day. And as the course has proven, adding fresh perspectives and a wider range of backgrounds to the mix can only lead to greatness.