From Learner to Leader: Reflections of a Student Ambassador
At TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE), we believe in the power of youth to shape the future. Our program immerses high school students in the exciting world of entrepreneurship, providing them with the tools and skills they need to become tomorrow's leaders.
Being a Student Ambassador in the program is exciting because it means getting to experience the program again, with more perspective than the first time around. I get to learn even more through helping others. I get to see how other groups with their ideas take the same principles I’ve learned and apply them in different ways, and most excitingly, I’m able to see what I missed before through a different and new light. So far, the community program has had three sessions: Idea Generation/Team Formation, Customer Discovery, and Rapid Prototyping. The most exciting thing for me, and for many, was the prototyping session. This is a fun opportunity for students to work hands-on with various materials to create a physical representation of their ideas. After personally struggling with this, it was amazing to see how students across different groups used prototyping in creative ways that helped them learn more about their solution.
Students created models of soil-collecting, tree-planting robots, sketches of websites, apps, and social media pages, digital 3D-models of alarm clocks, lifelike aluminum foil watches, and larger-than-life paper prototypes demonstrating the mechanism of drug-detecting gems. Through this process, it was interesting to watch how a simple rapid prototype, made with limited materials and time, did so much to validate and give shape to an idea. The prototypes also uncovered lots of details about students’ solutions. For example, one student demonstrated the various parts that went into their tree-planting robot, such as a frontal camera, soil sampling test tubes, and fertilizer application, in addition to a special arm to plant the trees upright. Some of the rapid prototypes are pictured here:
