The Pilot: Startup League
Preface: From ProtoHack to Startup League
ProtoHack’s story began in 2014 with two co-founders that look nothing like the ones that are writing this series today. Rukshana and I are two Canadian females that are of ethnic minority from families of immigrants and refugees. (We mention this because our story will speak to our unique perspectives and experiences navigating through the tech . +startup world)
There are, however, a couple of things that past and present ProtoHack co-founders share: 1) an affinity and passion for innovation 2) a lack of ‘technical’ skills / a comp-sci or engineering background. Both things combined also make for the foundation of our ProtoHack community — 20k strong and from 27 cities across 8 countries around the world.
I’ll save the details, but over the course of 3 years, we’ve grown into a small and nimble team of 5, sprinkled in all parts of North America. Somewhere along producing prototyping hackathons (innovation challenges that don’t require code) for local startup communities and corporate clients, we discovered that behind the problem was an even greater problem: an ability to problem seek, identify, and subsequently, solve.
Whether we had run these innovation challenges for students in developing countries or c-level execs at Fortune 500 companies, most ideas couldn’t answer the simple question of, “what problem are you solving?”
Our hypothesis: if people are better problem solvers, their solutions (and therefore, ideas) will lead to better innovators.
(Some of) our assumptions: problem solving unpacked is two parts: 1) empathy and 2) defining; practicing problem solving needs to start early; learning process is more important than outcome; problem solving can be fun.
I’ve planned for and witnessed thousands of ProtoHack attendees go through our challenges and can attest to the impact and value of our learning environment because they’re collaborative, applied, and a little competitive — all things that we’re so excited to be introducing to high school students through Startup League.
With this discovery front of mind, Ruks and I have directed all of our efforts with ProtoHack toward education. We now produce innovation challenges solely for academic institutions and ed-tech conferences — two categories of education that drive innovation and change from within. Our tiny team continues strategize, plan, and execute while Ruks, Matt (our only techie & proud CTO) and I are in Palmdale, CA running a 4-week long pilot with the iLead Charter Schools.
I didn’t even get to the part about us being in NYC as a part of the NYU StartED Incubator for the last 3 months. So yes, this is how fast everything’s moving. Don’t blink or we’ll probably be in another city. Hopefully Hawaii. Less than 8 months ago, I acquired ProtoHack with only the vision in mind that we were going to introduce this hands-on, interactive learning experience to every student in the world — without a clue how and without a realistic grasp of when (I thought this would at least take 2 years).
Here we are: 1 week into our pilot and the lessons have been invaluable and in the most unexpected ways. My mind is blown everyday and my heart overjoyed with this opportunity. We have 3 groups of students from 2 different schools that are the very first to pilot a game we’ve designed to develop critical thinking, applied creativity, and problem solving.
We’ll tentatively call this game: SUL-X.
Follow @StartupLeagueio & don’t miss a moment of our journey as we empower every student with the one, most powerful tool to change the world: education.
Ready to play?
Startup League, Co-Founder, CEO
Week 1, Day 1: Rules Were Meant to be Broken
Ruks and I laboured for weeks, researching everything from pedagogy to design thinking, game theory to gamification — all in preparation for our ‘highly sensitive research study’. While Ruks’ education is in behavioural neural endocrinology has afforded her her fair share of experience in the research lab, we were no match for the reality of a live high school classroom.
The rule book that we meticulously produced with the extensive insight and feedback of experts in the fields noted above, quickly went right out the window the moment we started. It was immediately evident that there was no shot of simply handing over the rule book to our teachers (would-be coaches of the game) and merely observe as sophisticated researchers do. Neither the teachers nor the students were prepared to do any of this ‘figuring it out’ thing on their own thing. The reality is, written instruction was null. Our game and goals had to be intuitive — until that was the case, we needed to be explicit about what we wanted.
Welcome: ‘Ms. Annee’ and her TA, ‘Ms. Rukshana’
Our first group of 10 students were a distinctly unique bunch as a function of the school structure. Students of iLead have great liberty in their approach to education, all the while maintaining the standardize dcollege-prep requirements. Students had the option to come and go as they pleased, with most (to our dismay) opting for the latter as early as 20-minutes in. It was deflating, to say the least.
I struggled with everything from how to interact, which instructions to deliver, what type of examples to use. I’m a very confident public speaker and facilitator, but this experience was entirely new and oddly frightening. It’s been over 10 years since I was in high school and this environment was bewildering. Where was the chalkboard, rows of indistinct desks, and HB pencils? I felt painfully old and not at all relatable.
With minutes left, we dwindled down to a small, but surprisingly interactive group of 3 students. With constant movement around us (we share the space with a dozen other students and facilitators), it made both sparking and maintaining interest extraordinarily difficult. However, after tons of stumbling, we prevailed and began to see these students connect.
I did, however, get the chance to ask one of the remaining students (a local YouTube celebrity) about the types of games he played and apps he had on his phone home screen. This, by far, was the most enlightening part of my day.
It was evident right then and there that this wouldn’t be the rigid, formulaic research study worthy of publishing in an academic journal; instead, this was going to be a personal, interactive learning experience for everyone involved. How ironic.
Goodbye, rule book! (…Sort of)
[Insert meme of me throwing the rule book out the window and then later scrambling to pick its remnants back up]
Yours Truly,
iLead Santa Clara, Design Tech Facilitator
Week 1, Day 2–4: Language is the way to Learning
Our second and third groups were spaced out throughout the rest of the week and exhibited more traits of a typical classroom. Again, I played the role of facilitator and found it to be extraordinarily rewarding. Over the course of a few hours, I got to witness countless ‘aha moments’ that were core to my initial love affair with ProtoHack.
We were previously advised to refrain from telling the students about our ‘why’ (something I obnoxiously obsess over and preach to anyone who will give me the time of day) behind ProtoHack and now Startup League. Instead, we briefly introduced ourselves and dove right away into the material.
I started, “This is a ‘Problem Finding’ game. Your objective is to help your fellow classmates guess what the problem statement is using first, user personas.” Right, okay. The students immediately opened SnapChat or began conversing with their classmates about Fortnight. In hindsight, it was glaring that this jargon (inspired by Design Thinking, which at the time, was the foundation of our curriculum) was going to the death of our game.
What should’ve taken a single failed effort to learn, took a couple of hour-long sessions, to identify that our description of the task at hand and how to approach it needed to be simple AF. So let’s try this again: “Your job is to help your classmate guess what the problem is using a sentence about who cares and why they care.” Simple. As. F. Right away, they got it.
This personal ‘aha moment’ of ours helped to frame the remainder of the week and subsequently, the narrative of our game. The way that we interacted with the students felt and became more natural, easy, and effective.
They say that the most intelligent people can explain the most complicated concepts to young children — whoever they are, I interpret to be incredible problem solvers through language.
Annee Out.
Boss Lady, Startup League
Read “The Pilot: Startup League” on a larger screen, or in the Medium app!
