Last weekend, innovative minds from all over the Kansas City area competed in Kansas City Startup Weekend EDU.
More than 22 teams pitched their ideas for improving education through technology, and from those, nine were selected to work with mentors and turn them into real-life applications.
The winning team, MYLearningKC is developing an app that will teach Japanese though a game.
Michael Legler, the team leader of MYLearningKC, says the idea came from shared love of learning languages among his teammates, fellow Kansas Citians Daniel Woodhams, Tyler Morrison, Niko Colom and Charles Breedlove.
“Learning a language that has a non-Latinate alphabet can be really daunting,” Legler told Steve Kraske on Up To Date.
The app is a simple game that uses rhythms to teach the first character set of Hirajana, the basis of Japanese, in just 10 levels. Once the app is launched, it can be applied to other languages with foreign alphabets, and even Latin based languages like Spanish or French.
Legler hopes the program will be available on app stores by July. But until then, it will take about $50,000 and months of programming and designing.
“I have a very busy few months ahead of me,” Legler said.
The weekend's event was one of many similar competitions happening more frequently in the Kansas City area, all contributing to a culture that fosters and support startups and small entrepreneurs.
“Kansas City is crazy supportive,” said Katie Boody, founder of the Lean Lab, that organized the event. “Google Fiber has been a huge help, and we even had last-minute sponsors asking to help.”
Legler, who is a senior at NYU, said he hadn’t experienced such support until now, and said his team wouldn’t have been as successful without it.
The presence of Google Fiber in Kansas City, in addition to the multitude of organizations designed to support entrepreneurs, make the city one to watch for new exciting companies.
