Music provides the soundtrack to much of what I do in life, especially when it comes to creating or building things, be they a batch of hot muffins or a cool application, and one song lyric that has always stood out to me is “I believe the children are the future”. Recently, along with my colleague Leslie Nutter, I got to witness that future first-hand.

Recently, I led a workshop about Careers in Technology. After a short discussion about the realm of software development, the various roles that one could play in it, and a fun exercise demonstrating a live-action bubble sort, I had the privilege of walking several groups of middle and high school-aged students through the process of creating an app of their own design from concept to mockup utilizing simple arts and craft materials. We used a scaled-down version of the Agile methodology and worked in 5-minute sprints culminating in short presentations about the apps they designed, the needs that their apps fulfilled, and the features their apps contained. The ideas ranged from connecting volunteers and service providers to organizations seeking volunteers and services, to utilizing AI models to match music preferences to user’s moods based on the metadata attached to songs.

As we walked them through each step in the process, they naturally followed the Agile process in such a way that showed that this generation, born and raised with ubiquitous technological availability, are ready to tackle tomorrow’s problems. Thanks to the Delaware Business Professionals of America for giving us this opportunity!

Written by L. Dolio Durant