The Story of Superhero Boost (now BOOST by Born Just Right)
The story of Superhero Boost (now called BOOST by Born Just Right) starts way back in January 2016. Jordan and I were invited to attend an event in San Francisco called "Superhero Cyborgs" and it's where the Project Unicorn idea happened. We were so lucky to get to know Kate Ganim of KIDmob and work with Autodesk, the company that hosted the event. The design experience and the opportunity to share Jordan's design ideas to the world sparked our hope to give more kids the experience by turning this site from a blog and into a nonprofit. A partnership between Kate and I grew from there.
A Great Idea Gets Better
Three people smile while holding a sign that says "Canopy."
Last summer, we tested out a one-day superhero design day with kids in the Boston area at Canopy City coworking space. It was a ton of fun and incredible to see what kind of ideas could happen in one day. The kids in our one-day event inspired us to want to do more, but it took us almost a full year to put it together.
BOOSTxBJR 2018
Luckily, the January 2016 event caught the attention of some developers at Google. They reached out to Kate she had a chance to start collaborating with a team there to create a new five-day superhero event that we named Superhero Boost (Now BOOST by Born Just Right). Why BOOST? That's because this new workshop gave us a chance to add code to the design thinking. Google's offered to introduce our BOOST kids to a couple of different DIY AI coding kits. That conversation gave us a chance to go back to the host of the 2016 Superhero event, Autodesk. We were so lucky the company was able to host us at its Pier 9 facility in San Francisco once again.
While Kate worked on a curriculum for the workshop, Born Just Right focused on recruiting kids from across the country to join in on BOOST. Kids (and a parent) came into San Francisco from the East and West Coasts and Jordan and I traveled in from the Midwest.
Thanks to your donations, Born Just Right was able to provide transportation for the out-of-state families and bring in our organization's design director, Sam Hobish, to work with the workshop participants. Sam had a chance to work on computer-assisted designs with a number of our BOOST kids!
Eight kids smile, most standing, one in a wheelchair with a girl kneeling next to her.
In five days, our BOOST kids came up with some really fun ideas. Right now, they are each partnered with buddies to expand on their ideas. We hope they will have a chance to present those updated ideas in a couple of months. Their ideas are awesome and I can't wait to feature some of them in another post very soon.