Session 2 — The Brainstorm: Teaching Farmers on the Worst Connection in the World

Help us brainstorm for Mentivista's newest challenge: building a learning platform for farmers in Zimbabwe. The constraints are brutal: barely any wifi, phones that are old and basic, and power that cuts out for hours every day. How do you teach someone something practical when you can't assume data, a decent device, or even electricity? No tidy answer exists yet. We'll lay out the problem, then break into groups and you help us crack it. Bring your discipline, whatever it is.

Session 1 — The Story: From Camp to Company

• part 1 link

It started right here at the ITP Camp; several years later, an IMA LowRes degree, a pile of prototypes, and an idea later, it’s now a company Anastasia Dor will walk you through the real path from those first scrappy builds to the NYU Innovention finals, into the eLab Summer Launchpad accelerator, and out the other side as Mentivista, a company building learning systems for the people who actually need them. This is the honest version, including the stuff that never makes the pitch deck: how you fund a passion project before it funds you, what the competitions and the accelerator actually did, and the mistakes worth not repeating. Come if you're building something, thinking about building something, or just want to know how the sausage gets made.

Hosted by John Henry Thompson for Anastasia Dor au589@nyu.edu