Last week on Wednesday, May 16, 2018, the B.C. Tech Summit held its annual youth innovation day at the Vancouver Convention Centre. My class and I got the amazing opportunity to visit and explore the Tech Summit where we got to see many talented young entrepreneurs who told their stories and shared their ideas. I really had no knowledge of this huge event before hearing about it in class, but I knew that it would be a special experience. I mean, the regular pass to this event is $999, it better be special!  

Explore The Summit

We began our day journey by waking up nice and early and heading down to the convention centre. We were one of the first schools there so some of my friends and I explored a few of the entrance exhibitions. We first walked up to this crazy robot engineering station where students, who were about my age, had created robots that they would control move around a playing mat to pick up cones and stack them on a corresponding cone holder. The amount of programming and skilled engineering it must have taken these students to create these robots blew my mind. They even let me pilot one of the robots! It was pretty fun. Next we ventured over to a station where some of my other classmates had gathered. This station was all about pilot training. An app was created to simulate a plane landing, where the students were the pilots! One student would sit down in front of the computer with a steering wheel and foot pedals attached to it and we got to steer the plane into its landing strip. I may have crashed a few times and blown up the plane, but now I get to say I landed my first plane, sort of…

Presentations

As I was finishing looking around the entrance hall the big doors leading to the presentation room opened and students piled in looking for the best seats available. My class got lucky and we were positioned right in front of the stage. Different speakers and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about their amazing inventions and ideas. Some of the highlights for me was our own Premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, who talked about his ideas to make life more affordable, improving crucial services that people count on and creating more good jobs for the citizens of B.C. Probably my favourite guest speaker from the morning though was Brent Bushnell who introduced his idea, the Two Bit Circus.

The Two Bit Circus is an experiential entertainment company that focuses on developing Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and Augmented Reality to be introduced into entertainment and everyday life. He strives to teach and inspire students with his technology about  science, technology, engineering, art and math, or as he called it, S.T.E.A.M. He said that “65% of kids will be employed in jobs that don’t even exist yet” (Bushnell), how amazing is that? In the next century we will be living in a world that we can’t even imagine yet! To do this, he goes onto saying that we need to allow our brains to process all the kinds of things that are going on in our heads. “Let our minds wander”, be different, be unique because “cultivating creativity is just like exercising a muscle”. His technology is already being used to create viral music videos on the internet! Hearing Brent talk was an amazing opportunity, it made me really excited to see what the rest of the Tech Summit had in store for us.

Exploring the Summit

After the Morning Plenary, it was time for us to explore the rest of the summit. I was immediately drawn to a booth that had a Health Tech Entrepreneur named John Nguyen who was talking about his invention, Novion Health. Novion Health is a machine used to help Sonographers (ultrasound technicians) reduce the body pain and muscle strain caused from doing ultrasounds by hand. John said that Sonographers have to press the small transducer into their patients with a lot of force which can cause swelling, pain, tightness, and numbness. 9/10 Sonographers experience pain that can stay with them for the rest of their lives. His solution was to create a remote-controlled machine, piloted by the doctor, that can press the transducer into the patients. This machine will replicate the movements required for the examination and it will eliminate the pain aspect of the job. I thought this was pretty cool and thoughtful, I was excited to see that people are already coming up with ways to make jobs more practical and safer with the help of technology. After learning about the Novion Health my friends and I explored more of the summit and talked to lots of different organizations who pitched their cool and brilliant ideas. 

Another really cool booth was all about helping to teach nurses on how to deliver babies. There was this big table set up with this really realistic mannequin of a mother about in her last stages of labor.  Kyle, my friend was pulled up as a volunteer to show how the creation worked. The instructor taught Kyle step by step on how to deliver a baby, and a few minutes later Kyle walked out as a father. As I walked around the summit I took note on how many booths there were showing products that were built help out other businesses. Let me just say, there was a ton of them. I found it really interesting to see that there is almost a new industry blossoming around just helping make everyday jobs easier and more officiant. This also got me very excited for the future of technology.

This is an example of the activity kyle took place in:

Presentations

Once we finished up looking at all the different Tech ideas we made our way back to the presentation hall where we heard from a few more speakers. One speaker that really intrigued me with his idea was David Katz. David Katz is the founder and CEO of the Plastic Bank, “a solution to ocean plastic” (Katz). He started off his speech with a very powerful but confusing statement, David said: “the last thing the world needs to do is clean the ocean because we need to first turn off the tap”. Before we can even attempt to clean the ocean, we need to stop the increasing flow of garbage and plastic going into it. The Plastic Bank is a network of recycling markets where people living in poverty, primarily in Third World countries, can bring in recyclable material and in return receive education, income and medical care. He has created an incentive for people to collect recyclable material. Plastic Bank does not only help stop the flow of plastic going into the ocean (which is about a garbage truck of material every hour) but helps people get out of poverty and suffering. I thought his idea was really amazing and I would love to see how it progresses in the future.

Interviewing a Mentor

One of the last things we got to do before we were let loose to explore the summit again was to interview a mentor. I teamed up with Will and Lucas to scout out a mentor so we could interview them about the tech industry. Our mentor’s name was Curtis, he works for a company that is trying to turn B.C. into the best place to build a technology company. Curtis, Will, Lucas and I had a great talk about Technology as a whole and how he is contributing to help develop B.C. into a technologically advanced innovative province.

At the end of the day after seeing all the amazing entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts share their stories and ideas I was exhausted. I had learned so much about what I had previously thought was just some small tech industry. The world is changing so much, and the brilliant minds and workers I saw at the B.C. Tech Summit that day seemed to be leading the monster train which is technological innovation.

All aboard! Next stop, a crazy new world!    

Thanks for reading!