Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft's Dream.Create.Do event in NYC. This is their initiative to inspire ways student entrepreneurs using technology to do great things. They had 6 amazing young people who represent the embodiment of the initiative.
We got a chance to see extraordinary things like design custom-fitting clothing, experiments in space, an app to assist those w/ impaired vision, using an app to compose music, lemonade that saving the honeybees, and computer science education advocate.
Mikaila Ulmer: Founder and CEO of Me & the Bees Lemonade
Mikaila is a social entrepreneur, bee ambassador, educator, and student. At four years old, she was stung by a bee twice in a row and became fascinated with honey bees. She was inspired to create something that would help their declining ecosystem, so she decided to use her Great Granny Helen’s recipe for flaxseed lemonade. Now, she sells her lemonade (at Whole Foods no less!) while donating a percentage of the profits to local and international organizations fighting hard to save the honeybees. Now, Microsoft is helping Mikaila to grown her business with a Small Business Makeover, creating a Windows 10 app to help with ordering, labeling, fulfillment and more.
Blaigne Sixon: Texas All-State Jazz Sax Player & E4 Youth member
As a high school student with dreams of being a composer, Blaige saw a video of people using the Surface Pen to write music. Aware of E4 Youth and its mission to help youth pursue creative careers, Blaigne wrote a proposal to Carl Settles, founder of the program explaining the need and desire to use this technology. Blaigne was awarded a Surface Pro 3, and since has used Windows 10, MuseScore and Reaper to produce music.
Belen Guede: Computer science education advocate
Belen recognized that Latin America has a problem. Despite all the creative potential and its cultural diversity, the average student aspires to be the next Messi instead of the next Bill Gates. Why? Children have enormous potential and amazing creativity, yet in some places the opportunity to learn computer science is limited and often out of their reach, so it ends up not getting their attention. So, Belen applied for Microsoft’s Challenge for Change program, where she created an initiative that promotes the curiosity of young people, using local libraries as a meeting place at least once a week with volunteers so they can learn computer science, robotics and more. As a Challenge for Change winner, Belen has been able to bring this initiative to life in her local library and is continuing to spread awareness and education around computer science.
Micah Kim: International Space Station Program Participant at QUEST Institute
Micah and his classmates at QUEST are preparing to send a MinnowBoard Max running the Windows 10 IoT Core operating system up to the International Space Station. From there, they’ll conduct science experiments on things like seeing how metals react to electromagnetic energy in space. They’ll rely on a robotic arm and a camera to take photographic evidence of what happens. The code running on the board is written in C#. They will be able to check out results of their experiments in real time using the Microsoft Azure public cloud — because the board is an Internet-connected device.
Juliana Pirani: Founder of eFitFashion
Juliana is the co-founder of eFitFashion, a Brazilian startup with the mission of creating technological and social solutions for the fashion market. She understands that tailored clothes provide the satisfaction of clothes made specifically for you. So, the company built algorithms that customize clothing patterns based on a user’s measurements and connects the buyer with tailors and seamstresses in an online marketplace. After three years in the making, eFitFashion brought their project to Microsoft’s Imagine Cup World Finals in 2015, where they had already beat out competitors from Brazil. The event’s judges included Thomas Middlewitch (star of HBO's Silicon Valley), Alex Kipman (inventor of HoloLens) and Jens Bergsten (lead Developer of Minecraft), and they elected eFitFashion the night's winner. As winners, the team received a $50,000 prize and four weeks of acceleration in Microsoft Ventures, along with a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella.
Juan Pablo Ortiz: App developer
Juan Pablo is an entrepreneur who began his tech career at 13 years old, when he was awarded a scholarship by New Horizons Guatemala where he took his first courses of advanced programming focusing on developing mobile solutions for Microsoft technology. He is currently participating in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2016 tournament with his project, AVI, (Assistant Vision), implementing technology from Microsoft Research Labs (Project Oxford), Azure and Cortana. AVI is a virtual assistant for people with impaired vision or blindness by OCR (Optical Character recognition) that recognizes text in images and reads them aloud.
Nothing is more inspiring than seeing the youth taking full advantage of the technology of today to build a better tomorrow for themselves and others. Definitely inspired me to do more to help the youth and others to make their dreams become a reality.
What inspires you?
