Brooklyn teens building app that won NYC Generation Tech

There is no reason high schoolers can’t start businesses.

Three fifths of the team that won the first NYC Generation Tech prize of venture funding at the end of the program’s first summer were Brooklynites, said Alan Tenemaza, the team’s spokesman in an email to Technically Brooklyn.

NYC Generation Tech is a summer program for high school students that teaches coding and entrepreneurship. Students build an app to benefit their fellow New York students and pitch it to investors. Tenemaza was one fifth of the team behind SproutEd, an app-based forum for students to encourage each other and get help.

NYC Generation Tech is a project of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the NYCEDC.

The team has kept working on the platform since completing the summer program, according to the Daily News:

[Jayson] Isaac spent last summer working with fellow students Karishma Maraj, Melverton Hunter, Alan Tenemaza and Jin Yan Ruan developing SproutEd, an educational network where students can collaborate about school-related topics, ask questions and encourage their classmates to think creatively. It was the winning app at GenTech 2013.

“SproutEd empowers students to learn outside of the classroom, and discuss school-related topics on their mobile device,” says Hunter, a senior at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn.

The five-student startup company hopes to launch a version of the app this year. They are currently marketing the mobile network to their classmates.

Tenemaza told us that he is from Kensington, Melverton Hunter is from East Flatbush and Jin Ran Yuan is from Bensonhurst. The other two members of the team are New York City high school students Karishma Maraj and Jayson Isaac.

The team was also covered on NY1:

SproutEd on NY1 from NFTE on Vimeo.