Grade 10 student Alex Gillis, recently won a “Hackathon” put on by Volta, a local venture development company. This competition asks computer software developers to compete in creating marketable products. Alex’s team tied for first place. Their product, “MicroCent” is an application which allows people to donate small amounts of money to their favorite developer through the developer’s website while at the same time also donating to the developer’s chosen charity. Fifteen year old Alex found himself working with some of the best adult computer programmers in Halifax and I’m told he made quite an impression on the experts at Volta. More detail below.
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MicroCent.org Brings Big Change for Alexander Gillis written by Heather MacDonald, Dean of Students, Fountain Academy of the Sacred Heart
To a bystander, it looks like he’s in over his head. Of the 100 people who show up to the Volta Hackathon on Friday, January 17th, most are working as computer programmers. Others are designers, computer science specialists, or business people. All are adults. They’re gathered together in this collective of brainpower to see who can come up with a winning technological innovation. It’s an intense three days of design, coding and experimentation. From among the 40 or so people who will still be around on Sunday, the winning pitch will be awarded a Nexus 7 tablet and access to mentorship at Volta. There’s a lot of talent, so it would be easy to overlook Alexander Gillis, the quiet, unassuming Grade 10 student from Fountain Academy who is working with occasional advice from two of his classmates (Aristides Milios, Grade 10 and Colson Donohue, Grade 11--the only underage people in the competition)—until, of course, he won!
Perhaps no one is as surprised as Alex himself. He and his friends went to the Volta Hackathon to see what it was all about. He hardly expected to walk away with a key to the office—a sign that he can now go to Volta to work on his idea whenever he likes. Volta is a company whose mission is to “Provide World class mentorship and support to new start-up and potential entrepreneurs.” As the winner of the event, Alex now has access to their technological and business expertise to help get his idea off the ground. They will also help set him up with interested investors and even provide travel expenses for him to launch his idea outside of the city. At 15 years old, he’s the youngest “tenant” they’ve got.
His idea is MicroCent.org, a “ facebook like” type button that can be placed on any webpage. Linked to a MicroCent account, the button allows users to donate money to that page’s content creator. The donations come in small increments (up to $5.00), but Gillis designed the button with more than just business in mind: one-half of each donation will go to the charity of the content creator’s choice. Considering the global nature of the web, those cents might just add up for charities looking for ways to increase givings.
As a result of the win, more doors than Volta’s are opening for Gillis. One local infomediary company who heard about the win is looking to see if Gillis might be interested in doing some part time collaboration with them. As he embraces these new-found opportunities as a result of MicroCent, Gillis is finding out, in more ways than one, just how small change can be transformed into much bigger things.
