A Whirl of a Weekend

I spent the majority of this past weekend at Startup Weekend DC EDU at Georgetown University. Organized by Grockit, the idea is built upon the success of other startup weekends throughout the country. The event combined teachers, developers, entrepreneurs, and others in the education field in a fast-paced weekend of innovation focused on deploying the lean startup culture to the education vertical— a field that at times lags behind technologically. Teams are formed around pitched ideas, products and apps are rapidly built, and the weekend concludes with each team presenting its work from the weekend with a winner being selected by a panel of judges.

I came into the event knowing next to nothing about “edtech”. I was unaware of the amount of time, resources, and money being invested into creating innovative web and mobile apps to help teachers communicate with teachers to close the achievement gap. I went to Georgetown as a developer with the unique perspective of an undergraduate student. I had never been to a startup weekend before, but I have experience working with startups and am familiar with the ideas of the lean startup weekend.

On Friday, ideas were rapidly pitched by entrepreneurs and teachers. Teams were spontaneously created around the most popular teams, and the work began. I joined a diverse team led by an education consultant; we were joined by one other developer, two teachers, and an e-learning specialist. I think our team's balance across different industries helped us think creatively and allowed our idea to come together quickly. The idea itself? Create visual.ly style infographics for teachers. The graphics would contain various student metrics, data one or two steps beneath test scores and overall grades. These graphics could be sent home to parents or used in parent-teacher conferences.

We spent Friday night refining the overall idea and planning out how time would be allocated throughout the weekend. Saturday morning, we hit the ground running mocking up the infographic and refining our business model. On the development side, I worked as an intermediate between our other developer and the rest of the not as technical team. I spent time developing and designing the frontend of our prototype website and designing the actual graphic we would be dynamically creating.

By Sunday afternoon, things came together ferociously. Our other developer built a sick, open-source rails app that uses jquery and the new HTML5 canvas app to transform an uploaded spreadsheet into an infographic with dynamic data from the document. We plugged it in to the frontend site, and voila— our MVP (Minimal Viable Product) was live. After several iterations of our business model, we finally found a way to freely distribute the software and still make money. The application would be distributed to teachers and eventually at the district level. Included on the infographic will be customized action steps from the teacher. Sponsors in the education field will pay to have coupons relating to those action steps on the infographic.

The event was a great learning experience for me. I was finally exposed to rails development and plan to learn it to expand my development knowledge. I learned about all of the innovation occurring in the education field. Most importantly, our entire team worked so well together— we were even one of the four finalists— that we are planning to continue the development of our app in hopes that it can become a profitable startup with the power to improve parent-student engagement.