Peru Summer 2017 Blog

This week we are having a hackathon sponsored by Microsoft and DigitalOcean! Teams will work on building their MVPs and we will have workshops on various web technologies.

GSL is ultimately a sharing experience. It is a channel for MIT to share its methodology with the world, and a way for MIT and its students to have an immersive experience of innovation in different corners of the globe. Teachers learn from students and vice versa.

Our students for this year’s program represent some of the best and brightest in Lima. We had over 150 applications to the program but only enough capacity for 50. The student body is diverse and consists of students from many different majors and with various backgrounds in programming, design, and business. We believe the most effective teams are built by people with complementary skill sets and effective communication.

In the program, we have daily activities designed to teach effective principles of communication and team building. For example, one of our earlier activities was the marshmallow challenge. This is a simple activity that has each team build structures given limited time and resources. The team with the tallest structure wins.  Another activity we introduced is the NASA landing challenge. In this challenge, teams and individuals rank survival items in order of survival importance after a crash landing on the moon. Aside from being fun, activities like this encourage out of the box thinking, build team strategical planning and improve communication.

The feedback we have had from the students has been very positive. Many students appreciated the activities and agreed that they were essential to helping them have a better grasp of the material. 

Today is the first full day of the program. The program has about 50 students is hosted by UTEC. This year, we have decided to switch up some elements of the program. The MIT way of learning is learning by doing. We started off with a few exercises to demonstrated the core concepts of ideation and give the student a fun interactive way of learning the first stages of disciplined entrepreneurship.

This summer, in partnership UTEC Ventures the course will be offered for 6-weeks. During this offering we would like students to will learn the basics of entrepreneurship and select technical skills while applying learnings in real-time to a technology startup idea. Our course will focus on mobile and Internet technologies and are structured so that students are awakened to the commercial possibilities of the technologies.

The goal of this course is to provide students with the building blocks that will help get started down the path to a viable product. We hope that this course will contribute to the expansion of the startup community in Peru and foster young local entrepreneurs who will take on the challenges around them as opportunities to express their creativity.