Pilot is an organization that hosts educational workshops for students (usually focused on the high school demographic) to teach them practical skills in computer science and entrepreneurship. Students break into teams and work to build a prototype, then demonstrate the projects they created (generally apps or websites) to a panel of local entrepreneurs. Awards are given to the teams based on their evaluations. Local engineers and designers serve as mentors for the students during the event. The goal of the program is to teach students creative thinking, practical skills such as the design and coding of an app, and then the skills of pitching the final product to a prospective customer.

History

Pilot was founded by Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology graduates Mayank Jain, Alex Sands, and Gabe Boning after they recognized the need to bring practical computer science and creativity education to more areas across the US in a way that could bypass the slow moving educational curriculum in schools.

Event Locations

Pilot events were originally only hosted at top educational institutions in the United States, and are slowly being rolled out to additional universities and regions. Early event locations included

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

, MIT,

UPenn The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

,{{cite web, url=http://www.thedp.com/article/2013/10/pilot-philly-high-school-hackathon , title=High school hackathon coming to Penn in Nov. , publisher=Daily Pennsylvanian , date=2013-10-16 , accessdate=2014-09-10 and

Occidental College Occidental College (informally Oxy) is a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1887 as a coeducational college by clergy and members of the Presbyterian Church, it became non-sectarian in 1910. It is one of the oldes ...

, among others.

Event Model

Pilot events are generally either 12 or 24 hours long. Many of the educational techniques are modeled after practices recommend by the d.school at Stanford. They begin with team formation and a brainstorming/ideation phase. Students then wireframe their products and receive feedback from their mentors, usually engineers and designers from the local area. The majority of the time is then spent building a working model of the app or website that is demoed and pitched to a panel of judges for awards.

References

* * * * Educational organizations based in the United States