Hope To Happiness

Academy for Software Engineering - Mentorship & Clubs

Mentorship

The Academy for Software Engineering is just about done with its first semester of the inaugural year. Through iMentor, a mentorship program was setup pairing each student with an older mentor who meets with them once a month and emails with them regularly. A picture of one of the mentor sessions is here.

It was inspiring to see the students interacting and learning from their mentors and I hope they continue to get a lot of value out of the experience.

Student Clubs

One of the other initiatives we are working on is creating a set of after school clubs for students to engage in their passions when school is over. Its important to help nurture their interests and give them enough resources to fully explore.

We are looking for people to help lead the clubs each week (2 hours after school) and for companies to donate some of the items that would help run these groups.

A few of the requested clubs from students includes:

Video Game Creation

Robotics

Programming Team

3d Printing (Makerbot 1 has been donated)

Chess

Photography/Video

Art

Dance

We are looking to find student club leaders who can commit to 2 hours a week after school starting in February. If you’re interested, please send an email to fdenbow@afsenyc.org by January 23rd with more information about yourself and how you’d like to contribute.

AFSE Update - Mentoring and Rec Room

Lots of progress has been made with the Academy for Software Engineering (http://afsenyc.org) since the last post. Generous donations have been made of time, items and resources that have made the rec room fully stocked for the students. A full update on this will be coming soon.

We are also working on the mentorship program for the students as well. It is a program that gives each student a personal mentor for 2 hours in person in NYC a month (rest is over email). The program is run through iMentor, which has provided support for evaluating, sourcing, and organzing the program.

If you’d like to be a mentor (preferably people in the technology field) check out the information below and apply by Monday, October 15th.

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The Academy for Software Engineering (AFSE), a new public high school in New York City, is finishing a mentorship drive to match our 9th grade students with professional mentors from the technology industry.  We are using a program called iMentor to manage the mentor-student relationship and provide a curriculum for students and mentors to engage with focused around high school graduation, college admission, and career.  Anyone interested in becoming a mentor can read more about the program on the iMentor website: www.imentor.org, and sign up on the Become a Mentor page in the website (make sure to mention AFSE in the notes section so that you get matched up with the school).

The iMentor program asks for a minimal commitment from mentors including a one-time training session (2.5 hours) during the month of October or early November (a variety of dates are available), a weekly email response to an email that your mentee will send, and a once a month 2 hour meeting with the mentor at the school (40 Irving Place).  The weekly email is composed by the student as a part of a class during the school day and centers around a curriculum prompt provided by the iMentor program.  The school also has an assigned, full time staff member who is available to you for questions at any time - this staff member can help provide you with references to answer student questions, or give advice regarding student communication you may have questions about.  The email is exchanged through the iMentor system and students do not have the expectation of privacy in communication with their mentors.

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact Leigh Ann DeLyser, CS Curriculum Consultant at AFSE, ladelyser@afsenyc.org, Primo Lasana, plasana@afsenyc.org, AFSE iMentor Representative, or Larry Mahl iMentor Volunteer Coordinator lmahl@imentor.org for more information.

Thank you for supporting the next generation of Computer Scientists and Software Engineers!

Rec Room for Academy For Software Engineering

The Academy for Software Engineering is a new high school in NYC that has a focus on computer science education. You can read more about it at the main site here or on Fred Wilson’s blog post here. 

It is opening up very soon and I am helping to put together a rec room for the students to hang out in after school and in free periods. It is ~ 20 ft x 20 ft.

We are hoping some of you would be able to help us secure some of these items asap to furnish the room:

Furniture: Bean bag chairs, couches, small tables, tv stands

Electronics: TVs, game systems, speakers

Books: Technology, entrepreneurship, etc

Misc: Anything else that you think might be interesting to high school students interested in computer science

If you are able to help provide any of these items, send me an email @ frank at startupthreads dot com.

5 Companies I’m Excited About

A couple companies that I’m into:

- Turf : An app from an incredible designer from NYC, Michael Tseng, Turf is a iOS game that combines foursquare with monopoly. You checkin to get points, buy and sell properties, and maintain them. I’d love to see more games that take into account a real world component like location and Turf does this well. He has been thinking about this game for a while and its great to see this passion project come alive over the last year. Check out the kickstarter that launched it.

- Everlane : An online clothing merchandiser that produces high quality apparel for reasonable prices. Started by my TA in college, this site is quietly killing with awesome shirts and accessories without the crazy markups that other brands have because of their retail requirements. As people become more comfortable ordering clothing online, sites like Everlane will flourish. Its still early for them, but I can see this site doing well in the next few years.

- uBeam : Wireless charging. If this works as advertised, its going to be everywhere. Check the video: http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ . First done in 3 weeks (!) by two female students at Upenn. Really hope this makes it to market! 

- Kinobi : Motion capture based learning. A startup out of Startup Weekend EDU NYC, Kinobi makes it simple to create and partake in Kinect based learning applications. Think doing yoga poses or dance moves with the application letting you know exactly how to position yourself. I dreamed about doing this for dance classes when I did motion capture for games back at Carnegie Mellon. Kinobi is making it happen.

- Amicus : Social outreach for non-profits. Having worked with Habitat for Humanity for years, it was easy to tell that even some of the best non-profits need a massive change in thinking about how they do outreach and build an audience for their causes. Amicus gives them a platform to do this. In the future, I envision the platform expanding to a consumer facing platform for engaging with the causes people care about. The founder, Seth’s, fashion taste is also unmatched.

Bonus: RapGenius: A site that lets you write definitions of lyrics. I’ve been a fan of this site for a while, as they are an awesome example of how to do social media marketing / community right; their readers are engaged and respond well to most things they post. They also kill it on SEO for new tracks since they are the first to publish lyrics for new tracks, and the definitions give you the exact search terms that people will remember and search for. They also have sick startup t-shirts. 

My Steve Jobs Story

After my junior year of college I was able to finagle my way into an internship at Apple. I moved out to Sunnyvale, worked in Cupertino coding for an internal team and only passed by Steve Jobs a few times. He was always walking quickly, but would give eye contact and that brief half smile and head nod that strangers give each other.

I heard him speak in the executive lecture series, where all the Apple execs came in to talk to the interns. Steve took questions, and one was related to where he gets his inspiration from and he said half jokingly “from the scorn of women” before giving a more complete answer. +1.

My one moment with Steve was in the cafeteria. I sat down for lunch and Steve was sitting behind me speaking to someone. It was hard to concentrate on whatever mundane conversation I was having when there sat a man with so much vision and wisdom that I wanted to learn from, just one table away. So I listened, and remember hearing him say:

“I wish I could be a fly on the wall in 100 years to see what technology is like”.

That sentence stuck with me for a long time. To me it symbolizes the type of long term thinking and resolve necessary to build an entity (company, organization, ideals, etc) that is decades old. To create something that lives on for centuries and finds ways to impact our world in profound ways. Our incremental thinking in entrepreneurship must be balanced with a long term world view of what society should be like.

I heard someone say “what did Steve Jobs do beside put shiny iPods in our pockets”, which misses the boat on what a man of his stature can do to a society of entrepreneurs, if only as a symbol of what can be done with patience, taste, and focus.

Pancreatic cancer has taken the lives of many influential figures in my life, including Steve Jobs, Randy Pausch (who spoke at my commencement from CS at CMU), and my Uncle Charles Egerton Denbow. The disease cut their lives short, but their vision and hope for the future will live on through us.