The Demo Day X Journey: A Student’s Perspective
Every year, Project Invent hosts Demo Day X which is a pitch event for student teams across the nation to showcase their year-long projects and inventions to top investors and executives in the tech industry. Throughout the year, student teams brainstorm, ideate, innovate, invent, and pitch their products to their community partners and at various events such as Demo Day X in order to showcase a solution they have made to tackle a real-world problem.
DDx NYC Student Teams
One of the only middle school teams, Team Cherry Fit, mentored by Dr. Dawn Fichera shared their Project Invent story focused on building a solution for their community partner who has Congestive Congenital Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS), which makes it difficult for him to remember urgent tasks such as drinking water and periodically stops his breathing. Thus, they built a watch that sends him reminders to perform these crucial tasks as well as an integrated heart rate monitor to track breathing so it stays at a healthy level above 60 beats per minute. When preparing for Demo Day X, Team Cherry Fit was looking forward to their pitch since they enjoyed giving presentations as well as displaying their product at a table to answer questions from guests who would stop by. Another high school team, SO INVENTZ, mentored by Karen Connell focused on their community partner’s mission to enable a secure way of monitoring volunteers for different organizations based on certain qualifications. To solve this issue, they built facial recognition software that provided an extra layer of security, was portable, and able to be used for a wider audience. They were looking forward to presenting their product in a professional setting as well as observing how other groups tackled different problems at Demo Day X.
Demo Day X Preparation and Presentation
Since Demo Day X is an annual, large-scale event to showcase the culmination of a year’s hard work and innovation by many student teams across the country, students prepared extensively for their pitch and product. Team Cherry Fit split up parts of their slideshow to practice on their own as well as met twice a week for over a month to go over their pitch and practice the timing. They received feedback from not only Dr. Fichera, but they also demonstrated their pitch to their Assistant Principal and community partner who gave them additional feedback such as incorporating body temperature and what was useful to the average user instead of only those affected by CCHS. To prepare for DDx, SO INVENTZ had speaker notes to practice their presentation and came up with potential answers to questions that judges would ask. They were able to connect with a real product manager from the West Coast who gave them feedback and helped them transform their solution to help companies at a low cost. Both teams were nervous but excited when presenting their pitch to industry professional judges who they met at their booths and were inspired by. SO INVENTZ was especially inspired by the keynote speaker who started his own business and originally only had enough funds for him and his partner to fly to Silicon Valley, but they were able to return once their business was worth millions. Both teams felt extremely rewarded when they won an award that recognized their product and pitch. Team Cherry Fit felt proud since they were the youngest team present and they were able to pitch the idea to other professionals who were interested in buying and improving their product. SO INVENTZ was also proud of their team for successfully answering questions from the judges since it demonstrated their preparedness and team work.
Impact of Demo Day X
DDx and Project Invent has helped the students with their education and growth due to its hands-on experiential learning because to SO INVENTZ, computer science classes do not have as many hands-on components. They were able to have real world industry experience by building their own product and working with a team especially when it came to optimizing and iterating their ideas. Team Cherry Fit saw the opportunity as great public speaking practice especially being able to think critically and analyze their own ideas. They learned about entrepreneurship because their favorite part about working together as a team was brainstorming and combining ideas. With their award and funding, Team Cherry Fit is using the funds toward the California FutureFest trip that Project Invent is hosting. Meanwhile, SO INVENTZ is using the funds to improve their product by creating more prototypes and expanding its applications to be used by a variety of volunteer organizations.
Moving Forward
As the student teams reflected on their journey with Project Invent and experience with DDx the past year, they had advice to give to future students interested in innovation by participating in the program. SO INVENTZ encourages student teams to assign certain roles to members such as product manager, backend and frontend, design, and community partner liaison to delegate tasks efficiently. They believe teams should stay confident and go with the flow because any obstacles can arise and members can work together to tackle them. Team Cherry Fit emphasizes not giving up on the community partner’s goal and learning new technology to improve products such as programming languages. They also encourage their peers to keep an open mind and recognize others’ strengths so team members are able to contribute to their best capacity. Dr. Fichera, who has a doctorate in design thinking, highly encourages letting students take the reins and building authentic relationships with their community partner and users because students are the future.