I chose to study at McGill because I knew the school could offer me both an incredible network and rigorous academics. I valued hearing from professors who were doing the research first-hand or who had written books on the subjects I was studying. Everything at McGill seemed world-class and big, which was exciting to me coming from a small town.
McGill taught me to be a self-starter, which contributed to me starting a company. It’s such a big campus with a variety of clubs and organizations so you have to build your own path. I got involved in the campus TV station – TV McGill – as a news producer. I was also on the women’s lacrosse team and a counselor at the McGill Sports Camp and led the Ampersand Conference on mixing topics in arts and science. These experiences helped me explore the topics I was interested in and get hands-on entrepreneurial leadership experience building things with teams.
These experiences have helped me in building my own company, Unruly Studios. At Unruly Studios, we combine STEM learning with active recess-style play for elementary and middle schools in the U.S. and Canada. Our first product is Unruly Splats, programmable floor buttons that students code using an iPad or Chromebook to tell Splats when to light up, make sounds, or collect points when they are stomped on. Using block-based coding, students code the rules to create games like whack-a-mole, relay races, and dance competitions. It looks like this:
What sparked my idea to start Unruly Splats was my history in cognitive science and passion for mixing physical activity and learning. As part of my cognitive science major at McGill, I took a computer science class. It was in that class that I realized my early experiences I had as a kid learning to code impacted my understanding of logic and how computers worked. This was always in the back of my mind and is part of what inspired me to create Unruly Splats years later.