2020 Seattle Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge

About the Event

Seattle Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge is an annual startup pitch competition for teenagers, hosted by Seattle Entrepreneurship Club (SEC). The competition aims to encourage young entrepreneurs to promote their innovative ideas and build entrepreneurship and leadership skills, and build a platform for youth entrepreneurs in the U.S.

Prize

Final winners will be awarded not only prizes but also mentorship and support from entrepreneurship advisors.

• First Prize $2,000
• Second Prize $1,000
• Third Prize $500
• Special Prizes ($200 per winner)                                                                                               
  • Best Original Idea
  • Best Team
  • Best Presentation
  • Best Social Impact  

      

Event Timeline

1. Registration Deadline: August 7th.
2. Finalists announcement: August 11th

Judges will select ~10 teams from all contestants to compete in the Final Pitch Day,  based on project slides submitted and judging criteria.

Final Pitch Day: August 15th, 2pm – 6pm PDT via Zoom live streaming

Final Round Teams

The Mutorials Project

A web-based adaptive trainer with flexible ELO system focused on science subjects to help improve academic skills

Robot Nazar: A Multi-Functional Indoor Servicing Robot with Controllable Routes

This project proposed hereby for our FIRST STEM team, named as "Robot Nazar, is a multi-functional indoor servicing robot with controllable routes. The wide range of service functions provide interactive service resolution to education, business, and industry.  In the end, the proposed robot will contribute to the healthcare, education, and service industries with improved human interactions. The proposal plans to boost economic development and growth in the new normal of the anti-epidemic era, to revitalize STEM education, and to strengthen social exchanges. 

FTC Portal

A central place that can help you do it all; blogging, searching events and videos, and finding the right hardware.

Askbob

AI technology is not generally available for use by smaller corporations that don't have the resources to hire massive workforces to create the AI. The main problems are the lack of data and answers. while companies like amazon can hire people to design the responses for their AI systems. smaller companies do not have this luxury. We offer a solution to this problem.

Portable Energy Panel by Elemental Electricity

Our team has created a panel that can generate energy from the sun, rain, and hail. This energy panel is portable, scalable, and easily installable. It will fit on top of your house, vehicle or almost any surface. The product uses flexible solar panels for power during sunny days. It also uses piezoelectric plates to turn pressure from rain, and hail into electricity. This product can work for many weather situations.

Award.me

Have you ever had the hassle of figuring out where to put that huge new trophy you won, or how to even move it without breaking it? Have you ever wanted money instead of a trophy? Have you ever had a hard time remembering what you won at that math contest three years ago? Award.me is a revolutionary solution to those problems. These days, most events give out some kind of physical award, and they take up a lot of space, are difficult to keep track of, and are usually left to gather dust. We offer a central, 100% free platform for users to track their awards. Additionally, we work with event organizers to distribute awards on our platform instead of at the event, giving users the option of picking a virtual, physical, or monetary award. We also implement a rating system based on the reputation of organizations and user feedback so that anybody looking at your award list knows how valuable those awards you have are. This idea is especially applicable now, as many awards have been delayed or cancelled due to shipping issues--we actually have many trophies in our garage that we received for students at our school months ago but have been unable to distribute in current circumstances.

Artlluminate

Traditional art marketplaces are not built with the student artist in mind; at Artlluminate, our platform is designed specifically for students and provides a comprehensive tool set that teaches artists how to transact online. Beyond driving sales of art, we help middle and high school students develop the networking and entrepreneurial skills essential to forge a path to success post-graduation.   From discovering raw talent that few outside of classrooms can see, to providing a direct and clear way to support a student artist, Artlluminate is a seamless experience for young artists and a trusted and transparent one for buyers across the country.  The exploration of creative mediums takes a new turn for the benefit of your local community on Artlluminate, where we strive to create a community of support and discovery. Choose from a selection of legally-recognized charities to donate to direct your money to, and learn about your long-lasting and tangible impact through our newsletter.   Students are recognized for their efforts; Charities receive donations; Buyers enjoy original and authentic art.  It is our passion to illuminate art into the world.     [Note From Applicant]  Hello and thank you for taking the time to review our submission!  This is a kindly reminder that our slides contain animations and transitions that can only be viewed under "present mode."

LIDI

LIDI, which stands for "Learners, Instructors, Devices, and Interactions", is a software tool that helps improve online education quality and effectiveness. LIDI provides real-time assessment metrics for instructors; it also generates summaries for teaching materials as well as personalized summaries for learners. LIDI is also for parents and guardians who can play a more supportive role in quality education. LIDI is powered by multimodel machine learning technologies.   LIDI's artificial intelligence engine extracts and analyzes signals and information about audio, video, texting, and device telemetries. It syncs incoming and outgoing online sessions and generates abstractive summaries for previous relevant sessions.   LIDI seamlessly integrates with popular online teaching platforms (e.g. Teams, Zoom, and Webex). It also provides convenient accessories for instructors and learners to post assignments and answers, essays, etc.   Privacy and data security is LIDI's number one priority. It strictly follows government regulations and guidelines, such as the GDPR and US Data Protection Laws.   Our innovative LIDI is made possible by state-of-the-art technologies and our combined research on online education delivery, personality traits, and many other factors. Based on our market research, LIDI is a leading online education support tool that is cable of bringing online education to the next level.

LitterBot

A robot that picks up litter and disposes them in their right categories. Garbage, recycle etc.

Justice Coin

JusticeCoin is a radical decentralized mining scheme allowing everyone, regardless of financial status or physical well being, to be an active participant in the Social Justice Movement.  The recent protests in support of the BLM movement were powerful indicators for change in the United States. Many people, however, were unable to participate for financial or economic reasons, especially given the nature of the COVID pandemic.   By mining cryptocurrency, we transform your computer's computing power into funding for the BLM movement.   In the future, we will expand our outreach to more non-profit organizations. With enough downloads over time, the money builds up, and you’ll be part of an initiative with the potential to help thousands of people.

SolarCell

SolarCell is a product that allow you to charge your phone completely off of solar power! Using innovative technology, SolarCell allows you to charge your phone when you are in the outdoors completely off of solar energy. SolarCell makes the outdoors a safer and more comfortable place.

CloudBot

The FIRST LEGO League Challenge is an international robot competition organized by FIRST for elementary and middle school students. Each year in August,  hundreds of thousands of students around the world gathered together in the arenas to participate the competition in person. In 2020, however, because of Covid19,  the students are not able to join the competition in person, hence the FFL 2020 will have to be canceled if there is no plausible solution.  Our project is designed to handle this challenge by using Cloud computing to remotely run the robot. We are setting the cloud arena for the robots, so the students can program at home and compete on the cloud area. With our project the kids still have tones of fun, learning and collaboration during the pandemic

Halo

Our product Halo (Holographic Augmented LED Output device) allows you to interact with loved ones while still abiding COVID-19 CDC guidelines. While purchasing, H.A.L.O it also comes packed with a bracelet with charms to make your experience as authentic and interactive as possible. In the future COVID-19 will most likely not be an issue. However, our product will continue to be relevant due to Halo’s ability to also engage with deceased family members and it’s authentic

How to Register

General Audience 

Registration

Keynote Speaker

Xuedong Huang

Xuedong Huang is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Technology Officer of AI Cognitive Services. He is responsible for Microsoft’s Azure AI engineering and research to bring the dream of making machines see, hear and understand human beings a reality.

He joined Microsoft to found the company’s speech technology group in 1993. He helped bring speech technology to the mass market by introducing Windows SAPI in 1995, Speech Server in 2004, and Azure Speech in 2015. He served as General Manager for MSR Incubation and as Chief Architect for Bing and Ads from 2004 to 2015. He helped Microsoft achieve multiple historical AI milestones, including a human parity milestone in speech recognition in 2016 and a human parity milestonein machine translation in 2018.

He has been recognized with the Alan Newell research excellence leadership medal (1992), the IEEE Best Paper Award (1993), the Asian American Engineer of the Year (2011), Wired Magazine’s 25 Geniuses (2016), and AI World’s Top 10 (2017). He holds over 100 patents and has published over 100 papers. He co-authored two books: Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition, and Spoken Language Processing.

He was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University from 1989 to 1993. He received his PhD, MS, and BS from the University of Edinburgh, Tsinghua University, and Hunan University respectively. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.

Judge

(Alphabetic Order)

Christy Johnson

Christy Johnson is an entrepreneur and educator. She is currently building her fourth start-up, Artemis Connection and facilitating courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She also is adjunct faculty at the University of Washington where she teaches entrepreneurship. She has seven years of experience working in corporate strategy, including 3 ½ years at McKinsey & Co. Before this, Christy was an award-winning economics and mathematics teacher. In 2005, Junior Achievement recognized Christy as its National Teacher of the Year.

Recently Christy successfully led the following efforts:

• Served on McKinsey’s “Women Matter” and “Centered Leadership” research team. Synthesized findings and led leadership teams for women in the United States and Europe
• Created a talent acquisition and development program for a $24B conglomerate that resulted in bringing in new, young leaders for a Silicon Valley company; resulted in strategic partnerships with top universities
• Was VP at Flextronics, a $24B manufacturing company where she led a corporate strategy team’s turn around in order to yield more innovative strategies and pilot new initiatives
• Held the VP role at a Warburg Pincus-backed company where she developed and piloted a sales strategy for a new segment and redesigned operations
• Course facilitator for the Stanford GSB LEAD program. Courses include Strategy, Designing organizations for innovation & creativity, critical analytical thinking and innovation playbook.

Christy resides in Mukilteo, Washington with her husband, Kyle Johnson, her daughter and her twin boys.

Derrick Connell

Derrick retired from Microsoft in March 2020, and now spends his time consulting with startups, following his passion for human rights issues and pursuing photography and mountain sports.

Derrick started his career working as a software developer on the London Stock Exchange specializing in currency visualizations.

In 1992, he joined Microsoft where he worked in a variety of roles including software development, program management, customer support, marketing before taking on a role as Corporate Vice President for Bing and Cortana. In this role he led a global team of engineers, designers and program managers to deliver internet services to over 700 million users 24x7 across the world.

Derrick lives in Seattle with his wife.

Gordon Hempton

Gordon is a UW alum (double majored in CS/Math) and is a technical co-founder of the local startup, Outreach, which just closed a 50M series F round of financing. He is currently working on a new venture TBA. In his spare time, he enjoys running, hiking, and spending time with his wife and two children on the island of West Seattle.

Julia Beabout

Julia Beabout is CEO and Creative Director at Novaby, a global, digital art production company headquartered in Seattle specializing in 3D/AR/VR.  Novaby is the industry leader in world scale AR Placemaking.  Julia has a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural background with a BS in engineering and an MA in Asian studies.  She studied in China, speaks Mandarin and is an entrepreneur with 25+ years experience leading customers and organizations through complex strategic initiatives and projects in the virtual and physical world from concept through completion

Julia is also Co-founder of Tech in the Tenderloin, a San Francisco based non-profit that connects low-opportunity youth and families with high-opportunity tech through fun events and educational activities that expand career imaginations and life possibilities in our cities’ and nation's most challenging neighborhoods. She has been a Judge and Mentor for the Big Ideas Competition at UC Berkeley and has organized augmented reality hackathons and out-of-school tech programs for the U.S. State Department, Boys and Girls Clubs and the Salvation Army Kroc Centers.

Tyler Menezes

Tyler is the Executive Director at CodeDay, where he works to increase diverse Computer Science enrollment across North America by inspiring underrepresented students to give coding a try.

Born in Canada but raised in the Pacific Northwest, he briefly attended the University of Washington before dropping out to start a Y Combinator and venture-backed social video startup in 2011. This, combined with stints working in machine learning at Microsoft Research and as a programmer at several Seattle startups, led to his work finding data-driven solutions to increasing CS diversity and enrollment since 2014.

In his free time, Tyler helps run the Projects in CS class at Garfield High School, and organizes the public speaking event Ignite Seattle.

Highlight

SYEC 2019 Video

Partners 

(Alphabetic Order)

ANC

ANC is located in Seattle, Washington, USA, it is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to “enable individuals to achieve their academic and professional goals through acquiring a global mindset.” ANC is an international educational organization devoted to professional education consulting services and deep cultural exchange program. Its educational programs intend to be the main tool to transform individuals into prime human resources who act as competent and resourceful global citizens. ANC is a bridge that connects people from each country through “real life” shared experiences. ANC's goal is to strengthen international exchanges and cooperation, facilitate sharing high-quality educational resources and cultural values, develop understanding of cultural differences, enhance communication skills, and create opportunities for long-lasting relationships.

Chinese Entrepreneurs Organization

The Chinese Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO) was founded by students and alumni of Stanford University in 2008. Rooted in Silicon Valley, We aim to connect people who are preparing or running start-ups, and to communicate with overseas venture capital resources. We firmly believe that technology changes the future, and innovation drives development. Currently, we have more than 10,000 CEO members, 50+ venture capital activities are held annually by us with 100+ famous invited speakers.

CEO members have founded outstanding companies such as Jumei.com (by Ou Chen), RED (by Wenchao Mao), Mobvoi (by Yizhou Zhu), HoverCam (Wang Mengqiu), Alohar Mobile (Wang Chenyu), etc. Some CEO members joined well-known investment institutions such as GSR Ventures, IDG, FreeS, Zhen Fund, and more; some other members worked in giant tech companies such as Google, Twitter, Coursera, etc.

Chinese Institute of Engineers

CIE/USA Seattle is a 501(c)(3) non-profit promoting professional and academic excellence in the Asian American community through annual programs across the Greater Seattle area.

Chinese Radio Seattle

Chinese Radio Seattle (founded in May 2012) is a radio for the Chinese community in the greater Seattle area. We are the first Chinese radio (broadcasting in Mandarin and Cantonese) since there were Chinese in the Washington State 160 years ago. We are proud to provide Chinese news programs, special programs on topics of living, health, travel, education, movie, books, love, and family etc, and programs of Chinese songs, music, and entertainment, as well as talk shows.

Cognitive Lab

Cognitive Lab was established in New York, The Lab is supported by the leading organizations of China and the Chinese governments. We conduct research in a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary environment. Our educators are from world's top design schools and IVY universities etc. The lab is aimed at developing a leading Chinese platform of STEAM education with makerspaces. Our goal is to foster a new educational community for integrative learning with advanced educational concepts and multidisciplinary integration. The new concept community aims to comprise both a broad research agenda and educational program in Arts and Sciences.

With the most advanced teaching concepts, cutting-edge teaching method, and cooperation with global multidisciplinary experts from famous schools, the lab also develops various hard-core STEAM education courses for K-12 students, college students, and graduate students.

We will break the shackles of traditional education, to launch another cognitive revolution, popularize the best STEAM education, and provide the next generation with a completely different innovative education.

Emerald Parents Association (EmP)

Founded in 2007, Emerald Parents Association(EmP) is a grassroots parenting group which builds a strong healthy ethnic minority family community, promotes parenting and family values and organizes education and community activities for Chinese community primarily based in Great Seattle area. “Diverse Parenting, Unified Community”, we will achieve this with all of you!

JJ Lake

JJ Lake Business Center is a newly renovated innovative space located in Mountain View, Silicon Valley. We aimed to foster innovation and growth through community events, investment partner collaborations and global market access.

Little Master Club

Little Masters Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that seeks to provide an encouraging environment for kids to be learners, mentors, team players, and leaders. We promote “learning by doing” through a multitude of fun projects. Our goal is to connect children to their community, invoke their compassion and motivation, develop their skills through our projects, and give them an opportunity to shine.

Seattle Leadership Academy

Seattle Leadership Academy was founded by a group of local professionals in education, business and NPO with the goal of developing leadership skills in the next generation. We have developed a comprehensive and robust curriculum to teach children tangilble and intangile aspects of leadership including public speaking, confidence, creativity, and critical thinking. So far, nearly 200 kids have participated in one or more of our offline and online classrooms.

Washington State China Relations Council

WSCRC is the nation’s leading statewide organization dedicated to promoting stronger commercial, educational, and cultural engagement with China. Founded in 1979 following the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, the Council is the oldest nongovernmental organization advocating at the state level for increased trade connections with the People’s Republic. The Council’s membership comprises over 100 companies, financial institutions, ports, municipal governments, institutions of higher education, and cultural organizations. Their support enables the Council to execute its mission of strengthening the Washington State-China relationship, while enhancing broader bilateral U.S.-China ties.

About SEC

Seattle Entrepreneurship Club is a Non-profit organization, established in 2008. SEC offers a variety of services to promote the development of entrepreneurial activities in Seattle and North America. Since its establishment, SEC has attracted and developed 4,000 members of entrepreneurship enthusiasts and continues to grow.

For more information, please visit our website: https://www.seattlestartup.org/