Dubai Student shares her secrets to winning the GEMS Xcelerator Challenge

Embarking on this journey was a fun and fulfilling experience. And no, it wasn’t because it was a smooth ride, not by a long shot. During the research phase, it was easy to drown in all the information and data and feel hopeless when my “winning idea” was already made by a team way more experienced than me, a mere high school student. The development stage wasn’t any better, there was plenty of confusion reading through documentation and deep sighs when debugging code. After all that, my solution might not be the most effective solution and so I would go back to the drawing board. But it was due to these tough times that I was able to earn an invaluable learning opportunity. First, envisioning something and actually building it required to me gain several skills during the process. Secondly, the support I received was truly out of this world.

In partnership with Singularity University and GEMS, Global Futures Curriculum (GFC) was offered to students this year that provided the GIC teams at my school with deep intellectual insight into a range of exponential technologies (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Digital Biology, Robotics, etc.). We were exposed by our school mentor to the “tool kits” centered around design and future forecasting that helped the teams at my school to prototype solutions to the global problems using technology.

I presented my solution to the judges on the exhibition day where 383 teams exhibited their innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges and aimed at impacting over 1 billion people. My solution to the global inclusion problem was short-listed in the GEMS Xelerator category and I was offered mentoring from a senior leader and industry expert from Ernst & Young for six weeks.

This was followed by a two day boot camp at my school (GEMS Wellington Academy Silicon Oasis, Dubai) that offered interactive workshops on the end-to-end journey of how to validate, iterate, plan, grow and present the solutions. The boot camp was attended by all the shortlisted teams from the first round on April 16th and 17th, 2019. The boot camp helped me to connect with experts for mentorship and like minded students from other GEMS schools.

Finally, I pitched my idea to a panel of judges from VISA, Emirates Airlines, Microsoft, INJAZ UAE, DTEC and other organisations during the ‘Demo Days’ event held on April 29th at GEMS World Academy.

After winning the GEMSXelerator competition, I was granted seed funding and mentoring from GEMSX to take my product/invention to the next stage of development and eventually to market. I can confidently say that I am a vastly different person compared to who I was a few months ago, before I started the GEMSXelerator programme. And for that, I’m very grateful to GEMSX.

About the Author
Beaux Consunji is a high school student at GEMS Wellington Academy, Silicon Oasis, Dubai.