Minds move mountains
Early last month, over 100 high school students from across the Philippines gathered in the Henry Sy Sr. Innovation Center of Miriam College to think, create, and ideate projects for the 2017 YouthHack Ideathon. The projects were under the theme of “How to make sustainable cities and communities through industry, innovation, and infrastructure?”
As a rebranding of the YouthHack Startup Challenge, Ideathon is an event that aims to promote the startup culture among the youth by having them pitch startup ideas in front of a panel of judges.
YouthHack is an almost three-year-old non-profit run by college and high school students around the world. Its first chapter, YouthHack Manila, sparked led to chapters spanning from South Korea to Philadelphia. The organization’s overall mission and vision are to promote technology and entrepreneurship among the youth through various events. Other than Ideathon, YouthHack Manila’s pioneering events include a “hackathon” called Code Weekend and a startup incubator called the Ventures Program.
This year’s Ideathon brought teams from around Metro Manila, Davao, and Bicol to experience workshops and attend plenary talks. The plenary talks included Startups 101 from Joan Yao, vice president of Kickstart Ventures, and Pitching 101 from
Artie Lopez, co-founder of Brainsparks Philippines. The workshops conducted dealt with ideation, marketing, growth hacking, customer validation, and rapid prototyping.
The competition consisted of separate high school and college divisions, in which the first place winners won 12-day passes worth 12,000 pesos to Sparklab, an innovative workspace.
The winners for the college division include (from 1st to 3rd place): Finger Lickin’ Good (Ateneo de Manila University),
HazMap (University of the Philippines, Diliman), ZionTech (De La Salle University and Colegio San Agustin).
High school winners (from 1st to 3rd place) include: Evolved (Multiple Intelligence International School), Rockets (De La Salle Santiago Zobel and Southville International School), Veritas Team 1 (Veritas Catholic School).
Each of the winning teams created an array of startup ideas ranging from Team Finger Lickin’ Good’s app that connects locals within an area, to a selfdefense device by Veritas Team 1.
Ideathon 2017 brought together mentors, students, and startup enthusiasts from around the Philippines. These individuals gathered to ideate through startups and prove that with hard work and dedication, minds can move mountains, and build a better world.