The Skills you need to turn Talent into Success

Why the Avishkaar Microdegrees and Courses have ‘Demo Days’ and how they help children with awesome talent use their skills to become amazingly successful

Summary : The Avishkaar Microdegrees have invented the concept of frequent ‘Demo Days’ where students present their apps to an expert panel. Apart from getting feedback from experts, this teaches them an extremely important life skill of being able to “sell” their work. This hones their social skills, boosts confidence and makes sure that kids are able to share their ideas, find people to work with and get the popular support. These are the kids who go on to become entrepreneurs, leaders, managers and CEOs when they grow up.

It is common knowledge in the community of problem solvers and innovators that talent can be useless without good communication skills. As Lee Iacocca, famous entrepreneur and automobile moghul, says – “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”

We at Avishkaar solemnly believe in it, hence when we were designing the experience for our courses and Microdegrees, we realised that we need to build our curriculum in a way to teach these essential communication skills. Whilst a lot of other organisations are teaching coding skills online these days, they simply don’t teach kids anything about creativity and communication. These are two extremely important pillars when talking about innovation and problem solving.

So with that in mind our curriculum and experience teams got together to answer – “how can we teach communication skills in a coding/robotics class?”

Answer – Demo Days. It is a unique experience that is special to Avishkaar courses and Microdegrees. A Demo Day happens after every 8 classes (or two months) in our Microdegrees; and happens thrice over the 24 class (or six month) duration of the program. Here the students work hard to make a complete project and present it to a panel of experts from varied backgrounds – designers, professors, engineers and programmers.

The kids explain everything about their projects – Why they made it? What problem are they solving? Who are they solving it for? How does the project work? So on and so forth…

The panel then encourages them and gives them detailed pointers how to improve and take this forward.

When the kids do this it hones their social skills, boosts confidence and teaches them how to confront a crowd.

Even the parents are invited to these Demo Days because kids love nothing more than to show their talents to their parents. And the parents get a chance to see how their kids are shining and further encourage their students. They also get a chance to speak to these experts and seek advice.

It is due to this exciting event that kids are inspired to work extra hard in their projects – learn ownership and learn to get results for themselves!

It is no wonder that a lot of these kids go on to make wonderful projects because of this – some winning school science competitions with their robots and others uploading their apps on the google play store.

The kids take these skills and use them at various stages in life – when they go on to work with teams in school or college, when they partner with folks and present big ideas in office or if some of them end up becoming entrepreneurs, it is this very skill that helps them find investors and talented people to work with.

So without further ado – here’re some snippets of a Demo Day from one of our Coding & App Dev Microdegree batches.

Nandini 

Nandini always loved playing video games on her system but always wondered how it worked. Her curiosity brought her to Avishkaar’s Coding and App Dev microdegree course!

Watch Nandini presenting her code of a game that she created in just 8 days which was inspired by Mario and presented to experts in a ‘Demo Day’ as part of the Program.

If you have app ideas of your own and are excited about bringing them to life and uploading them on the play store, check out our Coding & App Dev Microdegree Program https://www.avishkaar.cc/course/beginner-coding-app-dev-micro-degree