Often Startup Weekend organizers will encourage participants to place different colored stickers on their nametags to indicate the skill sets they bring or the role they want to play over the weekend. For example, a green dot may designate an educator, while red would be a developer. This helps immensely if you have the beginning of a team but are missing a key role; you can actively seek participants with the color sticker you want.

Educator: This category includes K-12 teachers, administrators, higher ed professors and administrators, and occasionally other kinds of educators. Startup Weekend EDU is encouraging more educators to participate in the Ed Tech world, so that products developed will solve real problems in education.

Nontechnical: Some participants will have non-technical backgrounds such as business and/or marketing. Once I had a fabulous startup attorney on our team! Often non-technical participants can create financials and help with the business model. (I’ve found that many educators, including myself, are so focused on wanting to provide a service that helps teachers that we don’t worry enough about the business model.) I’ve more than a few fellow participants who already run their own startups and have invaluable advice to offer.

There can be significant overlap between the role of a designer and a developer. In the startup community, this can be amplified because an individual many need to take on more roles and will have a wider range of experience.

Designer: A designer is someone who basically creates the look and interface of a website or app; a great design appeals to its intended user and is easy to navigate. There are primarily two kinds of designers: graphic designers and web designers.

• A graphic designer is highly skilled at making the application look beautiful but may not have experience in making the application functional.

• A web designer may or may not have a graphic design background but has experience in making a site intuitive and functional for users. (A web designer will sometimes say they do front-end development.)

• You may also hear designers/developers share that they have experience in UI or User Interface design, which means they’re comfortable balancing technical functionality and visuals, e.g., deciding where to place a button on an iPad app and making sure that it works.

Developer: The role of developer covers a wide range of tech folks. Essentially a developer or “dev”is someone who is willing and able to code, though developers usually take on more roles than simply coding a project to spec. Most developers have a mixed skill set so they don’t fall neatly into categories, but here are some terms tossed around to describe different technical expertise:

• Front-end developer: A front-end developer creates the visuals and makes sure that they function. Some front-end developers also call themselves web designers.

• Back-end developer: Most of the work a back-end developer does is invisible, but crucial. A back-end developer builds databases and infrastructures that support websites and applications.

• *Looking at the creation of a website registration process provides an example of a function that needs both front-end and back-end work: A front-end developer/web designer would make sure that the registration button was in a logical place and clearly directed users to register. Aback-end developer would create the database that would connect to the front-end, so that all of the registration information was logically stored to allow users to log-in and interact with the site under their registered name.

• Hacker: In the Ed Tech community, hackers are not malicious programmers trying to illegally break into computer systems. In fact, a hacker is someone who has high-level coding skills and genuinely enjoys understanding, creating and changing computer programs and infrastructure to make them do something different than originally intended. The title hacker is usually given to someone by the larger community as a sign of respect, rather than claimed by one’s self.

• Coder: The term coder is a bit dated because writing software has become more sophisticated, but it can apply to anyone who writes software. Coders tend to focus on doing specific tasks well, whereas hackers are known for liking to explore what a program can do.

• UX/User Experience: Someone who oversees UX or the user experience is responsible for the whole experience of the user from the first moment of clicking on the iPad, mobile phone or program through all of the facets of the user moving through a program, app or game. The goal of the UX designer/developer is to drive the user toward what you want. During a startup weekend, you won’t have time to iterate enough times to have a perfect user experience but folks with experience with creating effective applications can jumpstart the process.

• Gamer: More and more gamers are joining Startup Weekends for Education because there’s a movement to make some kinds of learning more game-like, particularly skills that need lots of practice until they become automatic, such as basic math computation.

• Information architect: There may be some developers who are information architects, which means that they have experience developing large-scale infrastructure. You won’t be building information architecture during a Startup Weekend—the lean startup model calls for continual iteration on a small scale and architecture implies larger structures. While you don’t necessarily need these specific skills, architects tend to have experience with other forms of development and design as well.

In the end, don’t worry if you’re not really sure what each job description means; just ask people what skills they bring and what they were hoping to do that weekend. Everyone’s usually friendly and happy to explain what they can and are willing to do!

This is for any educators out there interested in participating in DC Startup Weekend EDU this weekend or any others in the future! I plan on continuing to add to this Ed Tech Glossary, so please let me know if I’ve missed something or an idea needs clarification.

Though an experienced teacher and administrator, I was a complete novice when I joined a founding startup team. I didn’t know lean startup from Lean Cuisine. Customer validation was making sure to get my parking validated at a restaurant in Inner Harbor, and an MVP was the “most valuable player.” I suspect that many other educators interested in entering Ed Tech are coming from a similar place, so I’m creating a glossary of some Ed Tech terms, starting with the lean startup concept. For those of you who plan to participate in an EDU Startup Weekend, the founders and many participants advocate a lean startup approach to creating a business, so it’s useful to understand the concept.

Lean startup model: Eric Reis turned his blog into a recently published book, The Lean Startup, which was #2 on the New York Times Bestsellers list. (Inc. Magazine featured a condensed version of Reis’s book if you want further reading.) Essentially, Reis developed a business model that encourages startups to find out as quickly as possible whether or not the business idea/product/service is viable. The path to achieving this learning is to create a rough version of your product that goes into a cycle of testing, iterating, testing, iterating, testing, and iterating until the product is viable. An important part of this process is early and frequent customer validation.  The lean startup model came out of a concept in manufacturing where small batches are created so that there is minimal loss of time and money if the market isn’t interested in that version of the product. The same lean process works well applied to technology too. When creating a web-based tool or an app, you can create a mockup to garner feedback without building the actual product or feature, for example.

Minimally viable product or MVP: This is not the same as a prototype! In the Lean Startup model, the goal is to create  a test the smallest piece of a business to see if there’s a market for it. Reis defines the MVP as “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”  Essentially, you’re looking for the minimum set of features needed to learn from your early adopters because you want to learn early what users want and don’t want. It limits spending time and energy on products that no one really wants. Most teams try to develop a minimally viable product during a startup weekend, not the whole business. It looks great to judges if you’re able to validate your idea/product during the weekend.   You may be asking, but how do I do that?

Customer validation or validated learning: There are a number of ways to learn about your customers and what they like and don’t like about your product/service. There’s also a big difference between what someone might say they like and what they’re willing to buy or do. The best validation is showing that customers/users will in fact want your product/service and be willing to pay for it.

You first want to see if there’s any interest. For example, if you already have a free product but are curious if people would pay for some additional features, you could add a button to your site that advertises the new version (which you haven’t built yet!). If a number of users click the button, then you have begun validating that customers are interested. If no one clicks, then all you’ve wasted is the time to develop the concept—you haven’t spent excessive money and time on something no one wants.

During a Startup Weekend, you’re likely to focus on establishing general interest in your product or service, and if you’re lucky, getting some users to act. There’s not a lot of time to build significant traction. One way to establish initial interest is to create a landing page.

Landing page: To test the viability of an idea, a single webpage is sometimes created to see if anyone will sign up for the product/service.  There are several pre-built free pages out there. I’ve used and liked KickoffLabs as well as Launch Rock. What’s great about these programs is that they provide data: how many times the page was visited, how many visitors were unique, how many actually signed up. (There are some great programs with more bells and whistles for when your business grows and you need to track more complex user actions. At LessonCast, we use MailChimp).

Here’s an example: I joined the team TeenStarter at Startup Weekend EDU in Seattle. The concept for this youth-only site was to provide both advice on creating a business (how to pitch, how to develop an idea, how to market) and to provide a platform for students to pitch their ideas to get seed funding (micro-financing for teens). Our hypothesis was that a student would post a video pitch and then use social media to send it out to his or her network. Friends of friends might also contribute, until the student received the money he or she needed to launch a business or community project.

Here are the steps we took to validate the concept that weekend:

1. We created a landing page ( http://teenstarter.kickofflabs.com/) and used social media to blast to contacts of everyone on the team. (KickoffLabs showed 73 unique views and 17 users signed up.)
2. Again using social media, our team sent out a request for any teenagers who had an idea to pitch. (One 13-year-old relative of a team member uploaded a video late Saturday night!)
3. Once we had the site minimally functional, we posted the teenager’s video pitch and at uploaded a PayPal donate button. (Our featured teenager needed $60; $40 was raised before final pitches on Sunday night. She had the rest the next day!)

For a Startup Weekend, this exercise demonstrated a good conversion rate, and was a fairly solid proof of concept! You shouldn’t expect to get this far on most weekend projects.

Conversion rate: It’s one thing to get users to your site; it’s quite another thing altogether to get them to act/buy/participate. For example, if you send out an email directing folks to a landing page, the first conversion rate will be how many viewers actually click on the link to that landing page. Then the next level of concept validation is how many of these users actually sign up. It’s possible to have more levels of increased engagement beyond this, of course. Each increased level of engagement provides more validated learning about what customers will do. In the Teenstarter example, one measure of  a conversation rate would be that out of 73 people who viewed the landing page, 17 actually signed up by providing their emails.

There are other ways to validate what your customers like: interviews are often used. 

Interviews: Interviews are a great way to gather information during and after a Startup Weekend. Just because you are an educator does not mean that you should assume that you know what all educators will want—still take the time to get feedback from other teachers and administrators. Other participants, organizers and mentors can help you get in contact with people outside your own educator circle. Asking educators on other teams is one good method to gather some immediate input. Showing two or three versions of a product works well to provide you with specific feedback about features.

Mockups: Remember that you do not have to create a full product to get feedback. A mockup can provide the same information with much less time investment. I learned how to use Balsamiq (free trial period!) at one Startup Weekend—it’s great for creating a design of a website or iPhone app.

Traction: Once you’ve validated your concept, you next want to build traction, something that’s unlikely to occur during a Startup Weekend because of the condensed timetable but definitely an area of focus as you move your business forward. Traction means building a set of early adopters and being able to get those adopters to do something. For example, if you’re building a community-based site, then your traction would be connected to how many users are interacting on your site. If you’re selling a product to schools, how many schools have signed? If you’re interested in investors, then they will be interested in your traction.

When you’re at Startup Weekend, learn as much as you can from other participants and mentors about other effective ways to develop your concept into a viable business!

Next blog: Tech Terms for Teachers!

As one of the 3 or 4 educators (who also traveled across the country to participate), I have such mixed feelings about the StartUp Weekend EDU in Seattle. First, I want to be clear that I had a wonderful experience, the event ran well (Thanks TeachStreet and www.StartUp Weekend.org!), and I couldn’t have asked for a better team. My frustration came from the pitches minimal connection to education and the decided lack of educators present, as Audrey Watters aptly stated.

Perhaps sharing my thought process during and directly after the pitches might contribute to this conversation. I decided not to pitch because I went into the weekend with the intent to join another team; it wasn’t the right time to pitch anything for LessonCast, the ed tech startup we launched at an earlier StartUp Weekend, and I didn’t want to convince people to join me in a startup I couldn’t pursue after the weekend. Instead, I thought I’d contribute an educator’s perspective to someone else’s idea.

I almost changed my mind when pitch after pitch was only tangentially related to education. Out of all of the pitches, I liked the texting pitch but there are a number of other folks in this space already with viable products, and it was pitched by an educator, so I didn’t feel like I was needed on that team. Similarly, there are already several online course platforms that have simultaneous functionality like what Let’s Tea.ch proposed. Study Buddy already exists in many forms. Death Math and Babble Math concept were likely to become viable apps, but they weren’t looking for a teacher. Gaming makes sense for skills that require automaticity, such as multiplication tables, and at every StartUp Weekend someone builds at least one app that tries to do that. These apps help engage students in very specific skills, but they’re not solving the big problems in education. I liked that the “Buy a Broom” concept came out of a developer’s desire to help a real teacher; however, I knew about groups like DonorsChoose.org, so it wasn’t a real need. In fact, I shared this information with him, and he followed me to the group where I landed.

Here’s why I finally chose TeenStarter. On my plane ride over, I was working through program ideas (for my day job in education) helping move students toward being college and career ready, as part of our state’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards. My county’s in the midst of conversations around how we can have students tackle real-world problems—TeenStarter came closest to this.

My big issue with groups like DonorsChoose.org and Kickstarter.com is that teachers have to write the proposals and do most of the work. Teachers are already overextended. I liked that TeenStarter placed the process in the hands of middle and high school students. Our team didn’t have the time to add all of the educational pieces that would have given students more resources for learning how to organize an event or project, or creating a business, but those were part of the vision. I don’t feel badly for having worked with this group—I learned a lot from my team and I feel like they heard my educator perspective and will definitely contact me if they need that voice again. I also know that my students would use a site like TeenStarter, so I hope someone else does build it. It has the potential to help students focus their desire to make the world a better place into tangible projects, and it allows donors to fund small projects in their communities.

I’m still figuring out how to bridge the divide between ed tech and education; I certainly gained more skills and contacts this weekend that will help me understand the tech side. Next I’ll be a mentor at the DC event, and I’m sure I’ll learn even more. Making these weekends really move education forward is a work in progress—that’s why it’s so great that there’s now a whole series. I’m sure they’ll get better and better.