Clubhouse at Teen Start-Up
By Lach Howarth
Featured Image: Clubhouse Coordinator, Lach, and Aviation Teen Start-Up participants playing and recording music. (Source)
Last week I was lucky enough to be a part of the Lighthouse Business Innovation Centre‘s Aviation Teen Start-Up out at the Canberra Airport and Brindabella Park.
Aviation Teen Start-Up is an innovation camp for 10 to 18 year olds, run during the July school holidays. With a focus on aerospace innovation, it encourages students to invent, explore and experiment and let their dreams take flight! Over three fun-filled days, students are taken through the innovation development process from idea to execution. Students work together in teams to come up with an idea for a product or service that they believe provides a solution to a problem their generation will face in the future. The event concludes with the students pitching their concepts to a panel of judges.
The YWCA Canberra Clubhouse was invited along to be a part of the Technology Showcase section of the Aviation Teen-Start Up. The Technology Showcase is an opportunity for participants to take a break from forming and developing pitch ideas to explore new technologies they may not have had contact with in the past and to serve as potential inspiration for ideas and solutions.
We brought our recording studio out to Brindabella Park and ran a session on recording, looping, mixing and keyboard skills. With close to 50 young people participating it was a great afternoon, we even had a few parents of the young people say that the Clubhouse showcase was the highlight for their children. There isn’t much I love more than being able to share the enjoyment I get from music with others. We had some accomplished pianists record some interesting versions of well known songs, people who’d never touched a keyboard before recording loops and beginning to improvise solos, groups of people playing the keyboard at once, effectively looping without the use of a computer and much more.
We were not the only group participating in the showcase, Microsoft showcased programming within Minecraft as well as their HoloLens and Poppin Code brought out their HTC Vive (which I talked about in a previous post, Virtual and Augmented Reality – What is it?).
Ricky, from Poppin Code, demonstrating the HTC Vive with an Aviation Teen Start-Up participant (Source)
Overall it was fantastic to see so many young people interested in and excited to develop solutions to real world problems and I’d like to congratulate Team Easy-Fly for their winning pitch. You can read more about Aviation Teen Start-Up and Team Easy-Fly’s pitch on Canberra Business News and if any of the things I’ve talked about interest you and you would like to become a part of the Clubhouse (doesn’t matter if you’re 10 – 18 years old, an adult, or a kid trapped inside an adult’s body like myself) get in contact!
