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When UNLV’s 3rd annual President’s Innovation Challenge opened in the fall 2023, a handful of students came together to craft a solution to a shared challenge: how to help loved ones be heard.

From a sister with a birth defect that impacted her speech to immigrant parents who experienced struggles with the English language, the team was inspired to create Mimic, an app that won them first place. 

The UNLV President’s Innovation Challenge is a team competition that encourages entrepreneurship to help solve major problems in Southern Nevada and beyond. In response to this year’s prompt to chart the future of education through innovative applications of artificial intelligence, Team Protégé focused on a solution that would help improve the lives of the people closest to them: their families. 

The competition began with 21 teams submitting proposals. Seven teams with the most competitive proposals advanced to the final round.

At the culminating event on April 10, final solutions were presented to a panel of judges, and the winning teams were awarded cash prizes to support the implementation of their innovations.

The Winners

• Grand Prize and $25,000 — Team Protégé’s “super tool” for teachers: Mimic, an app meant to minimize educator strain and help students who are English Language Learners or have speech disabilities. 
• Second place and $15,000 — Chembot AI for its technology to promote success among pre-med students who struggle with organic chemistry, a “weeder class” that disproportionately affects students from underrepresented minority groups. 
• Third place and $10,000 — VisionByte Labs and its immersive virtual reality experience dedicated to improving literacy, student memory, and retention. 

Here the grand prize winners reflect on the competition and their win.

��ҳ| �鶹��ýӳ�� Team Protégé

Team Protégé’s proposed app, Mimic, helps local teachers of students who are English Language Learners or who have speech disabilities. 

More than 20 CCSD teachers told the team that the hardest part of their job is creating individualized learning content. To demonstrate the need for Mimic, they drew upon some facts about Clark County School District (CCSD):

• A 22:1 student-teacher ratio. 
• 30% of CCSD students in need of specialized speech instruction. 
• A quarter of teacher vacancies are special needs teachers. 

Team members:

• Stacey Lai, B.S. Computer Science
• Jerwin Tiu, B.S.B.A. Marketing & B.S.B.A. International Business
• Zachary Walusek, M.S. Applied Economics and Data Intelligence 
• Emilie Luong, B.S. Mechanical Engineering
• Cinnamon Sekula, B.S. Mechanical Engineering

How did you hear about the competition, and how did your team come together? 

Jerwin: I learned about the President's Innovation Challenge last year during the second one. Then right around last year's graduation, I went up to Emilie, and I proposed doing it, but we weren't really that serious. We all have known each other through this organization called APO, or Alpha Phi Omega. And so Emilie started getting a team going, we talked about some ideas, and then we recruited Cinnamon because they work together on a project. I know Zack from a friend, and I thought about him because they asked for a grad student, and he knows a lot about economics. I knew Stacey was good at computer science. So we reached out to her, and that's how our team came about.

What was your proposal, and why is your solution a good one?

Stacey: Mimic is an AI-powered speech feedback app aimed at helping students with speaking disabilities or who are English language learners.

Emilie: My parents are immigrants; they don't really speak English that well. Growing up, I was relying on teachers and being in an environment of other students speaking English. So, having the tool for parents as well to be able to help would have been beneficial, just to help pick up on some English words.

Stacey: I think a lot of us had a personal connection coming from first-generation homes where parents have an accent or don't speak English at all or we have a personal connection to someone with a speaking disability.

Zack: Stacey brought up specifically ELL or speaking issues and kids, and that stood out to me because, yeah, there's going to be a million apps at some point that are AI tutors. But speaking and language learning — that's something that we have a huge problem with here in the district. All of us spent some time in CCSD. We know there's a huge teacher shortage, we know they have a huge specialist shortage. So, we thought: What if we could leverage this?

I had been looking into Whisper and transcription and language translation AI and realized no one's tapped into using this as a solution. One thing we were told by the judges that made our project stand out to them was that, while our focus was children with a speaking disability or ELL students, it could also be scaled to almost anybody. I think they saw potential in that, not only to solve a problem, but also to generally be profitable and be recognized and usable for so many different people.

What inspired your idea?

Cinnamon: My little sister had a birth defect. So she couldn't speak very well. She still struggles with a lot of stuff. We also noticed that her teachers are good, but she hasn't made enough progress to be where she should be for her level. So we wanted to find something that could maybe help boost these kids.

What was your team’s process as the competition unfolded?

Stacey: We were meeting every week over winter break. 

Jerwin: Our meeting place was this cafe called Sweet Mong. We would meet there almost weekly or bi-weekly, sometimes even more than once a week. Honestly, the most time-consuming meeting that we've had was coming up with a name — that took hours and hours, and that's when we had to switch to a different cafe because the first one closed!

Once we started to get into the later parts of the process where we had to do the proposal, we started delegating based on strengths. Stacey has a lot of strengths in computer science. Zack is versed in economics, pricing structures, and cost models. And then Emilie and Cinnamon are versed in research and being able to synthesize that information and put it all together. It started as a collective effort, and then we started focusing on our own disciplines to be able to put everything together. 

Stacey: Jerwin made sure we were on track with everything. He scoped out the competition and watched all the videos from previous years to find out how we needed to market ourselves.

Zack: We met at least once a week since last December, which is crazy to think about, and getting close to the competition, some of the work was getting done close to the deadlines. We thought, OK, we're gonna put our best effort in, and in hindsight, I’m surprised at how consistently we were always meeting our own deliverables more or less.

Jerwin: When I originally pitched it to them, I was like, “We're gonna knock out everything by winter.” And it took way longer.

Cinnamon: We also had schoolwork on top of it. A lot of us have jobs.

What was it like working with your mentors?

Stacey: I was lucky enough to go to a conference for the ​​Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers in February, where I was able to meet with an entrepreneurship panel. I was surprised that they were so helpful. I told them about this competition that we have at UNLV. These are startup entrepreneurs and startup founders, themselves, and they were more than willing to help and met with us a lot to help shape our pitch and make sure that we were competition-ready.

Emilie: Although he wasn't a dedicated advisor, my boss and mentor helped a lot by giving us some information on how to make the presentation more cohesive. Having that support was really nice, as well. 

Cinnamon: We also talked to a lot of local teachers. They weren't mentors, but they got into our product and told us what they needed in their classrooms.

Jerwin: I wouldn't even say that we had one mentor. We were under the guidance of so many different practitioners, professionals, and educators.

Did a lot change with your proposal between when the competition started and where you ended up?

Cinnamon: I think the base of it was there the whole time, we just changed the details. Initially, we were looking at broad products to help people with speech disabilities, to help with interview skills, we want to help with all these things, then we thought, “That's too much. We need to narrow this down.”

Zack: I think the core idea was always there, but when you have such a cool concept, it is tough to trim those different branching pathways of where you could go. Touching base with all these different advisors was good because they were able to tell us whether something was materially feasible.

From the structure of the business to certain finite applications of AI, part of the reason why we focused on speech is because of one of Jerwin’s contacts at AI For Good at Microsoft. He framed it in the question, “What is more advantageous to do with AI?” It seems like a simple question, but speech is an area where there's a huge return to scale from using AI, and I'm sure a lot of the judges of the competition agree with that sentiment.

What did you learn from this experience, whether it be as an individual or working as a team? 

Stacey: For me, coming from a computer science background and having past internships, I focused on the technical part. So taking a peek into what is basically a pitch competition, having to navigate the startup entrepreneurs, and the business side of marketing was new to me.

Emilie: Cinnamon and I took a class last semester that incorporated the business aspects of engineering, how to make a pitch, and the startup aspects. We just took it because it’s an easy class, and mechanical engineering is a little difficult, but to actually compete and use those skills that we learned, we were like, “Oh! We know some of those things.” It wasn't surface level.

Cinnamon: Yeah, it helped me shape interviews with teachers. It was just really interesting to see a real pitch startup. I also learned that things are never as bad as they seem. I went in, and I was shaking. I was so scared to talk in front of everybody, but I did and I was like, “That wasn't too bad.”

Jerwin: I learned how projects pivot so fast and how you need to adapt yourself to be able to fit the kind of situations you find yourself in. Also, utilize the strength of each person on your team. I think that if you just throw tasks out willy-nilly and don’t understand who might be better suited for certain things, some parts won’t be as developed as others. I have only really heard about this, so it was nice to take the business theory and practice it in a real-life management kind of scenario.

Zack: For me, getting an understanding of the sheer time cost of moving from your conceptualized idea to the minutia. There were a lot of times when we were changing and work-shopping our ideas, sometimes over multiple meetings. Coming from research economics, it’s very analytical — you compile research, make your model, and you come to some finite conclusion. This competition was us just shooting from the hip and hoping for the best, but it was very exciting.

Stacey: I also learned how willing people are to help because we asked so many people, and so many said yes and were so excited. I learned that you can reach out for help, people are so nice and willing to help. That was something that was really cool to see.

How were you feeling before, during, and after the final round?

Jerwin: Before the competition, we had done our presentation through PowerPoint. Then they told us they were moving everything to Google Slides for the presentations. So our demo won't look the same, and I was a little upset because we had practiced with that. But we learned how to pivot, and we learned how to adapt.

Afterward, it kind of just felt like so much weight was lifted off, not only because we were done presenting, but somebody saw it and recognized our work. I thought, “Hey, even if we didn't have those pretty slides, somebody recognized that our project had value.” So that was nice to know that our hours and hours and hours of hard work paid off at the end.

Stacey: My dad told me that this is entrepreneurship, and this is your first test of adaptability!

Zack: We were rehearsing the day before. I think our first read-through was 10 minutes long, which would be three minutes longer than it should have been. Obviously, there was a lot of tension because we were just trying to nail it down. But when we showed up the next day, I felt like we were very locked in. So, it was like, “We're just going to do the best job we can do.” And as soon as we left the stage, it was like, “I don't care.” I know we did a good job of what we set out to do. Fortunately, the judges picked up on that, but I was satisfied the minute we stopped speaking.

Emilie: I don't think I was ever so nervous before, because I remember handing the mic to Stacey and my hands were shaking a lot. And I've done presentations before, but that was just completely different.

Stacey: Yeah, it was scary just to see, the judges, and the other teams.

What was your reaction when it was announced that your team won?

Stacey: I was sitting there like, “I can't believe that we won.” 

Jerwin: It's hard for you to evaluate your own presentation when you're presenting it. Nicole Thomas [president of the Graduate & Professional Students Assocition] came up to us and said, “One of you seemed like you didn't think that you were supposed to be up there.” And, it's true. We believed in our project, but we didn't know if other people would believe in it, too. And I think that's what it came down to, did we really sell it enough so that people can see that value that we've seen for the past six months?

Emilie: It was that feeling of imposter syndrome where you don't think your work is good enough.

What’s next for your team?

Stacey: We’re still in discussion, but we’re just trying to get through the rest of the semester.

Jerwin: Finish the semester, catch up on the work we might have missed during the challenge, and then go back. We all still believe in our project and its potential, so we definitely will take advantage of the resources from Black Fire Innovation and the university. Probably touch base with all the people we’ve been talking to about the project and get their input into making it a reality.

Zack: We briefly talked about it afterward. I think we’re all on the same page on taking the initial steps, and getting in contact with these people and learning what realistically this would take, what our commitments are, and whether we can pursue it.

What would you tell someone who might consider participating in next year’s competition?

Zack: Say goodbye to your Sunday nights!

Emilie: Get a good group of people, since we know each other and work together a lot, the synergy was there.

Jerwin: For teams competing in the future, you just need to remember to have fun. While you’re competing against others, things are intense, and there’s money involved, I think that if you’re not having fun, then it isn’t worth it to me. 

Zack: If you’re not willing to be open and hear other people out and value them and their expertise, I don’t think you would get as far as we did. Be flexible, understand each other, and give each other space to be people outside of the workload.

Cinnamon: People are really nice, so don’t be afraid to reach out. People have so much experience that could help, and the worst they can say is no.

Stacey: There’s going to be ups and downs, but just roll with the punches. Believe in yourself, we all had belief in the project we were doing, and it was nice to hear that other people believed in us, too.