Nearly 50 aspiring business leaders from four Burnaby high schools faced off in a student-driven contest of marketing ingenuity at Burnaby Central Secondary last month.
The Beyond Burnaby Business Competition saw teams from Central, Burnaby North, Burnaby Mountain and Moscrop compete in marketing contests, including a case study that challenged teams to come up with a better way to market the Microsoft Band smartwatch and a Dragon’s Den-inspired component for which teams were asked to pick items (rubber bands, chopsticks, paperclips, etc.) from a list and create a product to pitch to a panel of business professional judges from Langara College, UBC and local businesses.
Organized by a group of students from Burnaby Central, the inaugural event was dominated by two teams from Burnaby North who captured first and second place. Central came in third.
“What we’re really trying to do is to educate and get students prepared and interested in business,” said Central Grade 12 student James Kan, the event’s director.
International Mother Language Day
Burnaby schools will mark International Mother Language Day for the first time this month after the school board unanimously approved a motion last month to annually recognize the day.
The board adopted the motion after a presentation by Iqbal Bhuiyan of the Mother Languages of the World Society B.C.
International Mother Language Day, Feb. 21, was proclaimed by UNESCO in 1999.
It has its roots in the conflict between West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the struggle of Bengali speakers in East Pakistan to retain language rights.
“Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye,” Bhuiyan told trustees. “A different language is a different vision of life.”
Burnaby is the fourth school district in B.C. to recognize the day after Surrey, Vancouver and Richmond.
Thiel Fellowship for Burnaby grad
A 2013 Burnaby North Secondary School grad Grace Xiao has been awarded a two-year, $100,000 fellowship to improve a social networking site for scientists she cofounded with a fellow Harvard student.
Kynplex is a social network for scientists and a place for venture capitalists to find cutting-edge ideas with money-making potential.
More than 600 labs, mostly from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are already on the platform, which is free for now, and Xiao expects eventually to sell subscriptions to companies that want to browse for potential business partners in the sciences.
The project earned Xiao and cofounder Raul Jordan a Thiel Fellowship to commercialize their idea with help from the Thiel Foundation, a community of engineering, marketing and design experts founded by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal.
Xiao, a neurobiology student at Harvard, will put her studies on hold and move to San Francisco to develop and monetize Kynplex.
Send news from local schools to Cornelia, [email protected].
