BU Today feature: BU Spark! Innovation Fellows and X-Lab Practicum Programs Name Best Idea, Tech, and Design Winners
Originally published in BU Today on May 18, 2020. By Rusty Gorelick (COM’22)
This semester, students working with entrepreneur incubator program BU Spark! were tasked with working on apps and inventions that solve societal problems through technology.
So after the Zoom call for the virtual BU Spark! demo day on May 1 kicked off with danceable music, including Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” it became all business.
“The students who are here today have really been heroic in reaching this point,” said Spark! director Ziba Cranmer on demo day, acknowledging the disruption of adjusting to remote teaching and learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think it’s kind of a miracle that we’re here.”
Based at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, BU Spark! was created in 2017 with a $1 million gift from the Mullen Family Foundation. As part of the incubator, students can participate in the Innovation Fellows Program, a semester-long BU Hub Cross-College course combining elements of computer science, design, and business. Cranmer, James Grady, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of art and graphic design, and Spark! instructor Richard Kasperowski each cover one those course areas.
Another way students can participate is the BU Spark! X-Lab Practicum, a program where students work with Boston-area organizations to complete projects. Students can choose whether to do it as a paid on-campus internship or for course credit.
The end of semester two-hour exposition of Spark! student projects was broken up into three parts: first, the Spark! Fellowship teams presented the working prototypes of apps they created, then X-Lab teams presented the work they did with outside organizations, and finally, the audience could move into separate Zoom calls to find out more information about the projects.
The contest asked those tuned in to vote for their picks for Best Technology, Best Design, and Best Idea. Students worked in groups of three to six, filling roles like user experience designer, software developer, data scientist, and more.
Bookworm, an internet browser extension that saves and self-sorts links into folders within one window to eliminate clutter from desktops, earned the award for Best Idea. It started as a project aimed at helping dyslexic people read articles.