Diamond Challenge regional event offers an array of creative and innovative ideas for a panel of judges
On a Saturday last month, Dunn School in Los Olivos hosted a large group of budding entrepreneurs from around the country, who polished their presentation skills pitches for their business and product ideas.
On March 1, for the second straight year, Dunn hosted the regional competition for the Diamond Challenge, a competition billed as “The Ultimate High School Entrepreneur Challenge.”
Dunn Head of School Kalyan Balaven welcomed the competitors and help up the event as an example of what his school and the schools represented are trying to convey.
“This event is the perfect example of how education and innovation intersect,” he said. “The students here are not just dreamers, they are architects of our future.”
Although Dunn did not have any students who competed in the Diamond Challenge, the event matches up well with the efforts of the school to teach the philosophies and practices of business and entrepreneurship.
Dunn teacher Chad Stacy oversees the program as the Director of Entrepreneurship and explained how it works.
“At the heart of program is our student-run store 24/7 convenience store, where students can get food and snacks and other needs and pay electronically,” he said. “It’s our main revenue producer, and it’s where our new students are put to learn the basics. It’s real hands-on.”
Stacy said as the students get older, they can branch off into different areas.
“We can offer additional entrepreneurial courses, where the students can propose and make their own products and sell them in their own store,” he said. “And we have students invest some of the money they make from the store in the stock market and see how that can grow.”
Meanwhile, the competition offered a wide range of business ideas and concepts for the judges to evaluate. Presentations were made in two “pitch rooms” representing two categories: Business Innovation and Social Innovation.
In the Business room, judges heard pitches for many different ideas including those for The Chess Mate, a service to find willing players for chess that includes the ability to organize tournaments and look at tutorials to become a better player. There was also a proposal for a company called (eye)deal, that can detect eye disease remotely with an online camera. And there was Fizzle, proposing a device to installed in stoves to keep them from overheating and causing fires.
“I actually had a neighbor in the San Jose area who had his home damaged because his stove caught fire,” said Ishaan Mandala, who teamed with his Silver Creek High classmates Adarsh Sharma and Tanish Srinivas for the presentation.“So I started thinking about how we could help prevent that, and came up with this.”
Over in the Social Innovation room, threat of fire was also the inspiration for a concept called SkyScouts, which was proposed as a system to predict wildfires, so they can be dealt with before they do too much damage. The judges for that part of the competition also heard pitches for MeloSign (with the slogan “Making Music Tangible”), whose creators envision a way for the hearing-impaired to truly enjoy music, with visual cues on a screen and a wearable device on the wrist with hoptic vibrations to allow the person to feel the beat of the music.
Also in the Social category was Rhythmiq, billed as an all-encompassing online tool for professional, amateur, and aspiring dancers that would be a search engine for affordable training and dance studios, and online help to learn dance steps and create your own routines with the help of AI.
David Zheng, Russell Qian, and Suri Li, who all got to know each other through their dance experience were at Dunn to present their idea.
“This presentation and how we did it is kind of recent, but the idea kind of hatched with me about two and a half years ago,” Zheng said. “I was trying to get into auditions for K-pop and while doing that I realized there were so many talented people who just didn’t have a way to get their foot in the door. So I started looking for a way to create something for that, and meeting up with my partners, we tried to find an all-inclusive tool to help dancers and performers.”
After all the pitches were done, the students heard from the event’s keynote speaker Autumn Badelt-Fanning, a Dunn School alumna who created a mobile veterinary business in Paso Robles and now manages a vineyard in that town with her husband. She told the audience about her difficulties getting the mobile veterinary business off the ground before it was successful, and presented it as a lesson to not get discouraged if thing don’t work right away.
At the end, the winners were announced in each category who would advance to the Limitless World Summit in Wilmington, Delaware, on May 1-2.
The winner in the Business Innovation category was Soundwave, the creator of an AI accent moderator for foreign call centers to help they and the customers better understand one another. The winner if the Social Innovation category was GradeWithAI, which use AI technology to modernize methods for grading and “empowering educators to educate.”
