So recently in PLP we took a day trip to the BC Tech Summit. The Bc Tech Summit is a conference with hundreds of big and powerful people from the tech industry coming to talk and share their stories. This is a very prestigious event as the price of a general admission ticket is almost $1000. The BC Tech Summit hosts one of their days as Youth Innivation Day, meaning that lots of students just like us get the chance to come to the conference without having to pay $1000. If you want a bit more info on what this conference is actually all about, just watch this video here:

We arrived at the summit at about 8:30 in the morning. This gave us a bit of time before going into the conference room to try some of the robotics the robotics club had out for us. These robots had to be controlled by 2 people, so Robbie and I tried our best to get these robots doing what their creators had done with them. Once we were able to go into the conference room we had the chance to listen to some great speakers. We listened to the Premier of BC John Horgan, and the CEO and Co-founder of the Two Bit Circus Brent Bushnell.

To make this a PLP trip though we had a few tasks to do at the summit. The first one was to do some prior research on a couple speakers we would be listening to at the summit. So I researched Brent Bushnell and Karina LeBlanc.

First of all Brent Bushnell: 

Brent Bushnell is the CEO and Co-founder of the Two Bit Circus. The Two Bit Circus is a micro amusement park in downtown LA. It is known for its innovative and unique carnival ideas. His most famous of those being the Tequila Cloud, the Dunk Tank Flambé, and the Robot Bartender.

The Two Bit Circus uses technology in a way to make their carnival a fun place for everyone. It has many different activities that attract everyone. All of their ideas resolve around technology that the average day person wouldn’t have. Whether it be a lazer maze that you have to crawl through, or having a dunk tank where instead of being dunked in water, you actually just get cooked.

Next is Karina LeBlanc:

Karina LeBlanc is a former Canadian women’s soccer player who played in 5 Women’s World Cups and 2 Olympic Games. She was a goalkeeper that played with lots of fire and passion. After retiring in 2015, Karina became a UNICEF ambassador meaning that she can use her name to help support the kids in need, and to show people the real issues in the world. The main purpose of a UNICEF ambassador is to show problems in the world and to help find a solution towards it. Karina is also a Co-founder of the company iS4. iS4 does a number of things including run soccer camps for kids. iS4 is also trying to inspire kids to get outside and play sports. They’re trying to find the next generation of soccer players. The other important thing to iS4, is that they really wanted to share their bronze medals from 2012 with the whole country. This is because they didn’t feel like they were playing for Canada as much as they were playing with Canada.

The next task we had was to talk with some of the universities that were there and ask about some of the courses we might be interested in. Even though I think I have a pretty good plan of where I want to go and what I want to do, this was still important to me because I need a potential backup or in a different case I might actually decide I don’t want to do what I think I want to do now. Anyways I talked to an ambassador from UVIC about their computer science course. I asked about computer science because even though it definitely isn’t the thing I really think I’m going to go into when I’m in university, it’s the path I’m “meant” to follow. My dad works at Amazon and my mom works for an app development company, so computer science is in my genes.

The last thing we had to do was create a video or podcast of an interview with one of the mentors at the event. Alex, Ethan, Robbie, and I got the chance to talk with Dave Donaldson who is a Manager of the Geospatial Solutions in Teck Digital Systems (Teck). Teck is a mining company that goes out to gather resources, however they have been doing lots of research into how they can use technology in mining. The biggest thing they’ve come out with is a VR system that show exactly what the mine system will look like before they actually do any digging. This is very useful to show the locals what damage it’ll do to their land so that they can decide if it’s ok to go ahead. Anyways here is my podcast:

All in all this was a very fun day and a very important day too. I learnt a lot about the tech industry that I didn’t know about. It was also a very good chance to talk with some universities that I might want to go to in just a few years time.