 This is Sting Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Aloha Friday. This is Hawaii is my mainland, and I'm Kauai Lucas. Having moved a couple of years in Huluwa, on Hawaii Island, I realize local media often misses great stories from neighbor islands. Today's show about Nalukai Academy is one of those great stories. Nalukai Academy is a 10-day startup camp for high schoolers from across Hawaii Pai Aida. It takes place on the campus of Hawaii Preparatory Academy in Waimea on the island of Hawaii. This program is not only free. Participants are each given an Apple MacBook Pro. I'm very happy to welcome Nalukai Academy's Executive Director, David Clark, Instructor and Curriculum Developer, Aaron Schorn, and Avery Liao Troth, a participant in this year's camp. Thanks for having us. Welcome. David, maybe you could start us off with a little bit of the history of Nalukai Academy, and then we'll take it from there. Sure. So two years ago, an entrepreneur from the Big Island, Darius Montsef, also known as Bubz Montsef, he had had a career in Internet startup in Silicon Valley and wanted to come back to the Big Island. He had gone to Parker School. I was actually his teacher there. He graduated in 1999, and he wanted to move back. And in coming back, he wanted to create an incubator program to help develop more of a technology startup culture on the Big Island in Hawaii in general. And so he had the idea of bringing about 20 students together to do a 10-day camp and expose them to entrepreneurship principles, as well as entrepreneurs in the field who are working, so that they could understand behind the curtain what happens in a startup. And we wanted to equip them with the technology to be able to implement what it is that they had learned. Okay, so from there, I'm going to make the leap over to the curriculum development. Can you tell us a little about what your process has been for that? Totally. Working with an incredible colleague, Stephen Halstead, who before teaching was working at Amazon Robotics, it's a really great industry experience. We took what we were doing at Hawaii Ferritory Academy as teachers and applied it to the laboratory or structure of a 10-day summer intensive, where the students are actually boarding. We firmly believe in applied education. We call it product-based learning. So centering the curriculum and the pedagogy around the creation of a product or the creation of a business. That allows us to teach project management, process management. But more importantly, it allows us to kind of have a paradigm shift in how we view education. We want students to view themselves as creators, as people that can build businesses or take their ideas and turn them into real-world kind of applications and offers. And when I did it two summers ago, I kind of went for about an hour a day. And then, Bob select what I was doing and asked myself and Stephen Halstead to create the entire curriculum for the 10-day camp. Working with the incredible, incomparable Warren Doi of the Energy Accelerator on Kauai. I think it's called Elemental Accelerator. He flew down to a time out of his extremely busy life to help build out what we had already started to really hit lean startup methodology. And it was a life-changing experience for me. Well, and how was it for you, Avery? What were you doing before this all happened? So before going to Nalukai, I knew that I kind of had an interest in computer science from about sixth grade. I knew that it was definitely an option, something that I'd be really interested in pursuing in the future. So I kind of, I was taking some college courses for computer programming and I did a programming competition and I kind of started a Girl Suit Code Club and I realized that. You started it? I'm sorry? I started a Girl Suit Code Club and that kind of made me just fall more and love with kind of like computer science and I really, I guess, started thinking about how I could use that to, I guess, make something and put something out into the world that could have an impact on other people because that's something that was like really important to me having some sort of impact on the lives of others. So I heard about Nalukai from one of my former teachers and she really encouraged me to go because she knew that it was something that I would love doing and I went and I met so many incredible people and being there, it kind of really pushed my love of computer science and of, I guess, just kind of like teamwork and all that stuff even more and definitely from it I've learned a lot about not only, I guess, how to kind of create a startup and how to work on a project like that, but also kind of how I could use those skills and kind of apply them to other aspects of my life and also just knowing that that door is kind of open to me if I'm interested in pursuing in the future, which I definitely think it would be. I think the secret sauce is not having guest lecturers but having consultants. So bringing in people like Christine Sue, an unbelievable entrepreneur who created PastureMap, or Sydney Wicking, a kind of communications and listening guru, Kevin Ralston, a playwright and actor who works with Stanford MBA students on the art of pitch and performance, Warren Toy, again, to talk about market validation and prototyping, Austin Stewart, a wonder kind in project management, and many, many more people, they were enmeshed with what the students were working on, the offers and products that they were working on, and that was incredible to see. So they were all working on different projects, or they were teamed up, or how did all that work? So we started by looking at the overall group dynamic, and we wanted to teach project management, but we also know that a key ingredient in that is forming team, and so we did some very deliberate things to help build a culture of collaboration and team building, and then we put them in smaller groups, and we did a... Were they volunteers, or were they told what group to go with? Originally, we did a random selection and had them create the prototype for a food truck, just that idea. It was like a task exercise. Yeah, okay. That would illustrate some of the principles that we were going to be asking them to apply in later product work that they had developed. Now I want to hear from Avery about her food truck experience. Okay, so we actually did two different food trucks. We did one before camp started on like an online platform called Slack, so we... I believe that's where we had our random teams, and we... We did about a month of pre-work. Yeah, we did about a month of pre-work. Aha! And we... So before you had met your other team members, you were working together via Slack. Yes. Okay. For the food truck project, we did video calls, and we kind of like created this project. We created a food truck, and we kind of like built menus and all of these different things. And it was really interesting kind of like working on that there, because the first couple days of camp we actually... Once we were put on our actual teams based on like a survey of kind of where you stand for different skill sets and just things to really gauge how you would function in like a group dynamic, kind of seeing how we worked as a team. Well I worked on these teams because they were different people, just seeing how like a deliberately built team could like really impact the quality of our overall product. So that was really, really interesting. So for the next group, I don't know if that was a final one, but it was. Did you self-select or now that you knew kind of what you like to do or what your role was, how did that selection process take place? We had a pretty extensive survey that we asked them to do about two days into camp that reflected on some of the principles that we had already been talking about. And at that point the leadership, the curriculum developers, the instructors and a few other people that were working pretty closely with them along the way, we put together the groups based on interest and based on what we knew would be coming in terms of the offers that we were going to be giving them. So in one case there was a team, there were three individuals that had all conveyed that they were interested in design. Someone is interested in images and taking illustrations and turning them into graphics that can be on t-shirts and logos and things like that. Another person was interested in design and architecture and someone else was interested in general design. And so in looking at that we thought there were certainly some offers or some project ideas that we were about to offer them that they could choose from that a group of designers might approach a little differently than a group that had one designer and one coder and one performer, let's say. And so we put those groups together thinking that certain offers might be appealing to them. And at the same time there were other groups that had different skill sets so that they could approach different tasks differently, right? You had the product team with someone that was interested in marketing and coding. And then the personality came into it a lot as well based on the surveys that we did. But it was really wonderful watching them open this envelope of offers, right? Essentially products or companies that they could choose. You got to pick. How many did you get to pick from? I believe there was ten different offers we could choose from and we were instructed in our teams to pick our top three, wait, no, our top five, I believe. So we had to number them our first five and then the rest of them you would just kind of like leave on the table and then all the instructors kind of took the envelopes away into like a back little room and then you can have this offer and luckily none of the teams wanted the same one so everyone kind of got their first choice which is awesome. Just about. We actually had two teams that were competing for the same and but most had different first choices which was nice and we had asked them also to justify in the offer we would like this offer and hear the reasons why we think our team is particularly equipped to handle this offer and so we took that all into account and tried to get people basically as many groups as possible their first choice or their second choice. Okay, so we've moved on from a few trucks, what was your group's project? So my team we decided that we were gonna make an app called RU or RU so our app would help college students to kind of get college students who are from out of state or maybe out of country or just new to the area to get more acquainted with the local area and like a way that you could only do a few people there so it's kind of it's an app that would let both locals and people who just move there kind of like it's share information about like oh we're good places to eat we're good places to go on a hike just kind of all these activities to kind of really encourage people to form this sense of community. So we really thought that that was a really cool idea and that was that wasn't the specific offer that we were given since offers were all kind of vague so you could really go any direction that you wanted to with it. So you didn't apply as a team though, no, okay, so we're gonna go to a break in a minute but before we do maybe you can kind of give us a sense of how the selection process in in the students generally generally to be one of those to get those golden tickets I really want to go and say. Go to Macbooks. So this was the second year the second cohort that we were inviting over to the Big Island and and we were very interested in having it be essentially free to students and to provide them with a tool that they could all use without having to look into what your family's financial circumstances do a lot do you have a little is this the stretch have you had access to this before so we developed an application process that asked them asked the students to reflect on their ambitions what they might take out of this experience based on what their favorite gift is really important. We did ask that. That's a good question. What are your favorite emojis? We did ask them. What are your favorite emojis? I must have asked you. I looked at every single one. Yes, indeed. The only reason he was here. That's right. That's right. But also we wanted to see how they were as collaborators but also as innovators and so we asked them to identify something that they had hacked or something that they had fixed or something that they had they had developed in response to something that maybe didn't work as well as they had hoped it would. We asked them to identify a challenge in Hawaii something about here or about their life here. That was a challenge and something that they would do about it. And so we asked a number of questions. I think there were about 20, 25 questions. Very beautiful application. Exactly. And then the instructional staff as well as Bubs, myself, we looked over all of those, read those exhaustively actually and narrowed it down to our group that we invited. And we were very happy in our first year to have five islands represented. This year we had four islands represented. Well, that's still not bad. Yes, we were happy about that. David, we're going to take a little break and then come back and talk more. In the meantime, our viewers will get to see more about Nalukai. So I got to teach Jack Solomon a couple of years ago at Hawaii Periature Academy. I mean, drone videographer, videographer and had said to Bubs, Monsef, we have to bring him here. He is a born creator and innovator and I think would also bring a lot to the camp for the students and get a lot out of it. And in his eternal graciousness, Bubs flew him down and Jack was really a part of the camp, don't you think? And captured authentically the experience and as your viewers saw in a really beautiful way. So Avery, what was the, if you can remember back, way back to your application, what was the issue in Hawaii that you thought needed addressing? I'm not 100% sure actually because I remember that I did this application probably back in February or something like that. So I'm not 100% sure what I wrote but I'm pretty sure that it was, I think it might have had to do with, I think it was air pollution because that was a really big one that, a really big problem that stuck out to me and just kind of like the Vogue and yeah. Vogue. Okay, got it. So I'm curious about the less techie, my own bias side of the curriculum. So what was the culture and you talked about, I'm not sure who to ask, but maybe it's a combination is best. What besides, what startups, entrepreneurial projects, yes, but what is the goal of those? What did you have a sense? What was instilled or what did you soak up? Avery, let's start with you and then we'll have the... So from the experience kind of overall, I not only, so I obviously gained a lot of knowledge about like startups and kind of like the process that you'd go through to create one. But I also, I would say that I learned a lot about leadership and especially teamwork. In my team in particular, I kind of, I would say that I took on kind of a leadership role within my team and I feel like I definitely got a lot out of it and I know that I can apply those skills elsewhere. And also just in general, because there was only 19 of us like campers, we all grew very, very close to each other because we were like eating together, working together, we were doing all these activities together. So we really grew closer and we became like a really tight-knit community and I remember probably like on the third day, he made us all sit in the energy lab at probably like 10 o'clock and just spend like three minutes talking about ourselves and we got, like we grew really, really close and we still are so. Okay, so that's the teamwork bonding. But as far as what the purpose of doing the team and making a product, was that at all addressed? Yeah, for me it's ownership and understanding who you are and what your story is. I've been really fortunate to have mentors like Bill Wicking and even Stephen Halstead, a co-facilitator, really hyper-focus on creating agency within students and having them own the process. And working with Kevin Wilson and others, if I can speak for you, you know, her understanding what she was passionate about, what drove her, what drove other students, allowed them to kind of marry passion and purpose together and which I think made them want to learn technical skills and want to collaborate. I think there's also, if I may, an element of appreciation for diversity and I know that those are buzzwords in schools in general but the idea of a diverse team of people with different backgrounds, different interests, different inclinations and work styles to help them come together. So we did some very deliberate things to help them work well as a team but it was also sort of harnessing everybody's story and so as they got to know those, the different perspectives really helped the products or the services that they developed come to life. So I remember one in particular, we had a group that was interested in providing a mentorship application. So this particular student had benefited from going to a school where he had someone he saw as a mentor in a field that he wanted to get into but he had come from a school where that hadn't been the case and so he brought that and was very passionate about the offer that they made a pitch for and then they ended up developing this application in part because of the experience that he had had. Well, he was on the team with someone else who had a different story and connected to it for another reason, was really interested in kind of the finance aspect of how could you do something like this and how can we get a group of adults who are knowledgeable in a whole wide range of fields to be a bank of people, for young people to be able to contact and reach out to and say, I need to learn more about electrical engineering. There's no one who's doing this in my town or at my school but could I get in touch with someone who has that expertise and so they wanted to create the app to do that. I'm wondering if there was an element of something beyond the bottom line or the single bottom line or maybe not. I don't know, was that just left to whatever the individual's passions were happened to be if it was something as community minded as mentorship or if it was, wow, I just really want to make the best widget ever. We ended up seeing because we wrote very general offers and we wanted them to be able to have some room to move within them and to exert their own preferences on those things. We were a little surprised that so many of the students actually chose sort of a non-profit model and a service in most cases. So they were philanthropic or altruistic I would say in intent often and maybe that was because of some of the people that we had that spoke to them. We did have someone from a non-profit from the Kahilo Theater come in and talk about what it's like to be an executive director at a million dollar non-profit and what is that like and what are the challenges and it was soon thereafter that they were sort of honing on what they were doing. So maybe that was part of the influence and they generally in the same way that Avery was looking at something like air quality what we found is this particular generation of young people see their role as wanting to make a difference in the world and wanting to have an impact and we saw that in the products or services that they wanted to develop. I think that concepts like process and project management are universal to success in our own lives in a non-profit, in a tech startup, in plumbing or electrical business and so those were really big focuses for Stephen Halstead and I when creating the curriculum so that students left with not only this kind of family of youth that they could create friendships with their businesses in the future but these technical skills that would allow them to approach their school year, college and professional life too. So as far as like supply chain and integrity or stuff like that you didn't really go there. Yeah, it's you've got ten days. Yeah, okay, I got it. It was just a question. No, totally totally. No, no, and I think like that's the next iteration of the camp is even honing in more on what we did this year. That's the beauty of it is that it's a every year it's a different prototype. It's a very, so we just have a couple minutes left but I wanted to know a little bit of how you got into coding as a girl who codes and then where you're going with this. So I used to go to the prairie so it was an old girl school and they very much instilled in us kind of the whole mentality that you can do anything. You have the power and you have the resources and you can do anything that you want to. So about in sixth grade my math teacher was really big on coding and she got a lot of us really into it. And from there I knew that that was something that I was really passionate about and it was something that I wanted to help build on and so I kind of seek my own resources like online or different camps and stuff trying to just learn more about it because I was really interested in it. Seeing that especially in downtown Honolulu there wasn't a Girls Who Code club I thought that was a really interesting thing and that was something that meant a lot to me. So you started it? Yes. Excellent. I started that chapter. David just in the last minute or so what about next year? What about 2018? So we are developing our group of speakers that we're going to be bringing in. We're fine-tuning the curriculum. It's evolved already over two years pretty dramatically. We went in the first year from having one big project that everybody sort of worked on. They developed a website together and this year we found in five days from scratch. And this time we wanted to put them into smaller teams and see what they could develop in terms of product or service. We like aspects of both of those and so we're trying to basically figure out what worked best for everybody and what we wanted to include and then what the distinctions that we wanted to make and some of what you're talking about in terms of some basic business principles almost like a lemonade stand kind of concept as maybe some of the pre-work this year because as we got into funding streams and how are you going to start this thing they did a pitch to some venture capitalist types from the Big Island and... Shout out to Hank Rogers, all the wonderful people that came. And so the idea that they would have a really good sort of basic business principle mindset going into this camp is something that we think could enhance it. We're looking for support and help. We're looking for people to donate one of those MacBook Pros for each of the students and develop on our website. Which he is? Mallorcaid.org. Thank you. Yes, thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you, all three of you, and especially... Avery, I just wish you the best in your future. Yes, thank you. I just don't even know where to go to look for you doing your coding but do you have a project right now that you're working on? Actually, this school year I've joined MIT Launch which is... So basically it's kind of like Mallorcaid but spread out through the year, I guess. So I'm on a team and we are making a startup and it's entered in the MIT Launch competition and if we reach, if we get there, then we might be flown out. So that'd be interesting. Alright, well thank you all. Thank you very much.