Tag Archives: alumni

After taking Dr. Kim Knight’s Fashioning Circuits course, Amy Pickup BS’09, MS’12 knew she wanted to use her knowledge of art and technology to make a positive impact on the world.

Amy Pickup, a graduate of the EMAC program, teaches campers.

At the heart of Pickup’s inspiration was a LilyPad Arduino, a microcontroller board used in class that can create electronic fashion when sewn to fabric using conductive thread. She recognized the LilyPad as more than a means to a fashionable ending. Pickup saw it as a perfect opportunity to get young women interested in programming, coding, circuits and, ultimately, in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers via fashion.

After teaching 20 fourth- and-fifth-grade girls how to use the LilyPad Arduino alongside her Emerging Media and Communications’ colleagues at the Design Your World Conference in Arlington this summer, Pickup was ready to take her passion to the next level. Following the conference, she founded Etiquette Creative, a community of engineers, technologists, artists, and media experts working to “empower girls with the ability to make an informed choice about their future by exposing them to new technologies that interest them.”

Tapping their personal and professional contacts, as well as those from the Design Your World Conference and UT Dallas, the women of Etiquette Creative spent their summer planning a three-day camp that would encourage girls to explore opportunities in both fashion and STEM fields.

Twenty-four girls from the ages of 10 to 14 registered for the camp, half of whom were sponsored through Etiquette Creative’s partnerships with local engineering companies. Hosted at Oil & Cotton, a public art studio in the Bishop Arts district of Dallas, the camp introduced the group to LilyPad Arduino and allowed each girl to create her own electronic fashion project under the careful instruction of arts and technology professionals. The girls also benefitted from the expertise of UT Dallas students like Julie Strickland, a current mechanical engineering graduate student and senior mechanical engineer at Raytheon.

“Through Etiquette Creative, we have established an amazing community of women in technology, media, and fashion,” Pickup said. “I hope to build upon the camp’s curriculum and make it an annual event where young girls can learn to love technology like I do.”

February 24-26 marked Dallas’ first annual BeMyApp event, a mobile app design and development competition. Idea generators, developers, and designers of all ages and skill levels collaborated to create a functioning app in just 48 hours.

ATEC alumnus Ben Morrow organized and hosted the Dallas BeMyApp event.

Ben Morrow, a UT Dallas Arts and Technology alumnus and cofounder of Liquid, organized and hosted the Dallas BeMyApp event.

On Friday evening, 17 people pitched their ideas in 60 seconds to the designers and developers. The top six were chosen by vote and thus began the race to complete the apps.

The ideas were varied in premise, complexity, and execution; including mobile games, health analytics, and music and news aggregators with heavy social media components.

The teams developed their ideas on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone until Sunday evening, when they presented their ideas to a panel of judges. The winning ideas were a mix of beautiful design and execution.

Haikus, for the Win

The HaikuBrew team included one UT Dallas graduate and a current student -- John Watson and Rodivic (Rudi) Garcia, respectively -- as well as Nick Gottlieb, Brian Ellison and Robert Prottorff.

The first place winner, HaikuBrew, created a sleek interface for creating haikus using Facebook social integration. The haiku is a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven and five.

HaikuBrew allows you to write the first line of the haiku and pass it on to a friend to write the second line. The friend either sends it to another friend or back to you to finish.

Two UT Dallas students, John Watson, and Rodivic (Rudi) Garcia, were among the HaikuBrew team. John graduated from UT Dallas in 2005 with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. Rudi is currently a graduate student in Arts and Technology.

Nick Gottlieb, a Dallas techpreneur and a web contractor for The Dallas Morning News, pitched the idea for the app. ”We all have day jobs and we’re working nights to try to get this launched as a free app at South by Southwest,” said Gottlieb. Haiku Brew is the team’s first mobile app.

HaikuBrew allows users to collaborate with friends to create a haiku.

Dallas and Beyond

After the winner from each city was picked, they then were pitted against each other in a 48-hour online vote for the winner of the 2012 Mobile App Olympics. Dallas ranked second in the global competition, with first place going to Kinvolved from New York. The top three winning teams were rewarded with prizes and are expected to have apps available shortly.

BeMyApp attracts those who are truly passionate about ideas and flawless execution. Amidst the chaos and the pressure to complete a working app in such a small amount of time, those involved are dedicated to the cause they chose, and to their practiced discipline; whether it be design or development or leadership.

The competition was held simultaneously in Dallas, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Paris. About 700 people participated worldwide.

For more information about BeMyApp and the teams involved, visit the BeMyApp website. Additional photos of the Dallas event are available through a Flickr photo set.