Work: The Summer of AI, Chess, and Fire
As we do each summer this year we again welcomed a group of summer students to Iterate. Why go to Spain when you can learn rapid prototype development amirite? This year was unique and true to the old saying ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ as our summer students were met with a literal fire. Just days before we were to welcome our students we had the small challenge of our office almost burning down.
Nevertheless, the show must go on and with that, our team worked double time to find arrangements to house them. Major thanks to Ipsos and Grafill who helped us with temporary office space and Netlife who provided us with some laptops as we dried ours out. We eventually landed some more permanent space at the Rebel offices and now the fun could really begin.
In total, we had 10 students join us from NTNU, UiO, and AHO ready to get their hands dirty and learn alongside our team. They were a mixture of developers and designers and we set them loose on 3 existing projects and 1 new exploratory mission. They are as follows:
For our recent collaboration with Norway Chess and Magnus Carlsen our summer students worked on making our game even more exciting to watch. They did this by creating a live chess board that highlights your pieces, animating them when they get points and when they are captured. They gave our new venture a nice little upgrade that any grandmaster would be proud of. Ready to make your own moves? You can signup now and get your pieces in place.
Mixtape is a new Iterate venture that helps people discover and share music & podcasts. The students took the concept and some of our existing hypotheses and set out to create an MVP by summer’s end. They conducted market research, user testing and ran a slick design process. The result was a functional first iteration that we can now test with real users. We’re looking forward to learning more from their work and getting feedback as we continue to develop the concept.
With ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney you might say this was also the summer of AI. So no summer projects would be complete without leveraging AI to try something new. With that in mind, our students worked on FastTrac, a new tool to rapidly prototype AI-generated landing pages. In addition to creating landing pages, they also ran real traffic against them in the form of A/B tests. We gathered a lot of interesting learning from this that we plan to use in our future ideas.
Finally, five additional students also worked with Vake, one of our more mature ventures. They worked on analyzing noisy satellite images using machine learning and image analysis to unlock hidden patterns.
Big thanks to the summer students who joined us this year. We hope next year is just as eventful, but perhaps not so eventful as a 4 alarm fire.
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