Interning at Clearly Innovative: Week 7
What involves waterslides, investigations and product hypotheses? Read on to find out!
Last week was the final week for the 2015 Luma Lab summer program at the Georgetown Day School (GDS) lower/middle school location. On the final day of the curriculum, parents and friends are invited to take part in a Pitch Day. On this day, campers pitch their mobile app ideas to the audience and to a curated panel of judges who are tech experts from Clearly Innovative (CI). Campers also entertain intense questioning from the judges and audience members. Lead instructor Vincent Quarles and I would definitely agree that we had a wonderful time teaching campers about the fundamentals of coding and mobile app design, as well as spending time just having fun!
Programmers can have fun too!
After a careful tallying of scores, the judging panel selected rising 7th-grader Dean Atassi as the winner of the 2015 Luma Lab Pitch Day for the GDS Camp Session 2! Dean presented his Color Me Crazy mobile app idea, and also presented a working prototype after working closely with Vince. Color Me Crazy takes in a hex code or color string, and outputs that color on the device’s screen.
(left to right) Instructor/Intern Carlton Marshall, Pitch Day winner Dean Atassi, Instructor Vincent Quarles
To finish up Week 7, I also collaborated with the team on some additional tasks. Fellow intern Martia Simms-Beard and I worked together to refine our pitch deck for a confidential and in-house mobile app that Clearly Innovative will develop. After some feedback from CEO Aaron Saunders, we edited and improved upon our product hypothesis and answered questions such as, “What is the TAM (total addressable market) for the digital solution?” I also worked with Senior Solutions Provider Kwasi Frye to investigate and research background information about a potential lead for the company. In other words, you could say the latter assignment increased my qualifications to work at the J. Edgar Hoover building just a couple of blocks away from the CI offices.