This is such an emotionally hard post to write.

Particularly because it is fraught with so many mixed emotions for me.

I was honored to be asked to be a judge on a SHARK TANK for a junior high school earlier this week. There were 5 judges and although we were not asked to invest in any ideas our response was to be was it an investable idea and if so would we meet their terms.

We saw some clever ideas (the top 9+1 were voted on by each homeroom). There was an app to find someone to either clean your dog poop or find someone to clean it for you (called you guessed it Puper), a biodegradable chewing gum (basically compressed cotton candy in bubble gum flavour), etc. But the one that captured all of us judges was a when a bunch of kids from grade 7 presented a portable XRAY that can tell a cop whether a person has a weapon on them or not. Now, they did not have a prototype or even tech specs on how it would work. What they had was a brilliant idea and a message -- "this will prevent innocent black men from getting shot because cops will know that they didn't have a weapon."

I started thinking about this idea and I know it can be done, it can even be attached to the body cams and alert the police officer if there is a weapon. I agree with their idea, that yes it will prevent unnecessary shootings. "I frikken love this idea!" is what all the judges had to say and they git a standing ovation from all of us and the students as well. These 5 kids did not think their idea was all that because while the other competition had prototypes and demos, all they had were comic book like panels explaining what the app would/could do. What the student body learned is that they don't need a prototype to get funding, sometimes an idea could be so powerful.

What got me emotional though is that these grade 7 (11/12 year old kids) had to think of such an idea in the first place; that they come from an environment where this is a very real problem. Would my friends in Calabasas, Calgary or Calcutta come up with such an idea? Of course not because they do not have the need to. They do not feel the same danger as these kids do. We took them aside later and ask if they know of anyone who was a victim of a police shooting and all of them raised their hands. Shocking!

I love this idea, I am going to bring it to my former bosses at XPrize and a few other places. I told them that I am going to commit myself to seeing that their gets made. I just added a new goal to my list of goals, but it will be the brainchild of these 5 kids (I signed a non-disclosure not to provide names about the school or the students so sorry for being vague about this).

Whether you feel black lives matter or all lives matter, that's not the point, but I live in a country where indiscriminate shootings happen against a discriminated upon population. What if there was an app to prevent that? I think that these 5 kids (4 boys and a girl) came up with it.