Last week of Summer Lab!

Coming to the end of our Summer Lab road, the final set of sessions were of major practicality mixed with pure creative fun. Splitting the class down the middle with half taking part in making their own website and the other half programming robots then rotating.

We kicked off the day following the Wix method for the website design and were assigned the task of having a running website with a video uploaded onto it. Once we were done we switched over to Robot programming. It was a simple case of dragging, dropping and assigning directions to buttons in order for us to control the robot’s movements. The purpose was navigation through a small maze and whichever team took the least time to get the robot to the finish line would win. On top of it being a race, another component was decorating the robots which helped us chill out and temporarily forget about preparing for the dreaded pitch.

Andrew Patterson came in for the final session which I was excited about for two reasons. The first being that he was one of our mentors specifically for Virtual reality and secondly because this talk was covering Negotiation which was a topic we were told was not often taught but was absolutely essential for life, especially for an entrepreneur.

We put on the VR headsets and watched a negotiation between a landlord and tenant and then got to practice what we learnt in the simulation with each other. This really sparked my interest in wanting to get better at negotiating and was something I found valuable that I could apply to countless situations. This was also the final session we could attend since we were flying off on pitch day and so we said our goodbyes to our fellow summer labbers as well as Sinead, Elizabeth and Jamie and called our mentor Mark Hayes for some final pieces of wisdom before our trip. We had been selected to pitch our idea at the most influential tech startup event, 4YFN, in Barcelona as finalist in the mschools SDG competition!

Even though we couldn’t physically perform our pitch we recorded a video that Sarah tirelessly edited and were told would be played on the day. Sending off the video felt like a big moment because it was the last thing we would do that would be part of our summer lab journey. I wanted to be there on the final day, but at the same time everything at this moment felt like preparation for what awaited us in Barcelona and I was happy I had this foundation to support me for this trip I’d otherwise feel so unprepared for.