Stardom Up Helps Miami Middle School Students to Develop Innovation, Tech, & Entrepreneurial Skills

Stardom Up, a non-profit company that creates educational programs to support student curiosity about technology and innovation, has partnered with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, via Shenandoah Middle School in Miami, to enhance the STEAM (Science, Technology, Arts, Engineering, and Math) curriculum.  By combining an online platform with classroom learning, Stardom Up aims is to improve students’ problem-solving and critical thinking abilities as well as introduce them to Miami’s burgeoning community of technology-driven startups.

“Technology and innovation are changing the world at such an incredible and unpredictable pace that knowledge of the opportunities that these areas can bring is essential for the future success of students,” says Lu Martinez, co-founder and Executive Director of Stardom Up.  “The name ‘Stardom Up’ is a play on words: when repeated, it’s intended to sound like ‘start ’em up’, and it also reflects a pathway to help students to become the ‘stars’ who will one day help to build and improve our communities.”

Martinez is a 2008 graduate of University of Miami Law School, and had worked as Chief Privacy Officer, and later, Director of Policies, Training and Education for Jackson Health System. While at the company, he felt a need to increase his skills in the areas of technology and innovation. To accelerate his learning, he enrolled in Ironhack, a bootcamp in Miami that offers full-time and part-time courses in web development, coding, and design.  While he and his co-founder, Adrienne Celaya, had led Stardom Up as a small, fully self-funded charity that they operated during their free time, Martinez created the initial version of the online platform for StardomUp.com as his final project during the Ironhack course in the summer of 2015.

“I often say that Ironhack was the glue that brought my diverse skill sets and my social entrepreneurial aspirations together,” says Martinez, whose company is the recipient of a grant from the city of Miami to develop the Stardom Up program.  “Once I completed the Ironhack course, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be an entrepreneur or remain as an intrapreneur within a large corporate setting, but I was positive that I wanted to make a bigger impact and help others. After considering all factors, I left my job in 2016 and devoted myself full-time to building Stardom Up.”

Stardom Up is currently in the "scale up" phase at Shenandoah Middle School and is run during school hours by Martinez.  It’s supported by Shenandoah’s administrators and teachers, and is operated in collaboration with volunteers from Miami’s growing tech community.  Once a model for operating in a large middle school has been established – based on the current implementation of the program at Shenandoah – Stardom Up will be ready for launch at other schools across Miami.  Martinez’s plan is to bring the Stardom Up program to 10,000 middle school students within the next five years.

“As a result of their involvement with the Stardom Up program, more students – especially girls – are expressing their interest in pursuing studies and/or careers in technology-related fields,” says Mercedes Ortiz, a teacher in Career and Technical Education at Shenandoah Middle School.  “Our students have also gained an edge over other middle school children because they’ve been introduced to subject matter that would not have been offered to them, had it not been for Stardom Up.”

Beginning in January 2017, the Stardom Up program will be directly integrated into the science courses at Shenandoah Middle School.  The goal will be to improve the students’ outcomes in their classes while simultaneously sparking their passion about the roles that technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship can play in their schooling, and eventually, in their life pursuits.

About Stardom Up

Stardom Up is a non-profit, Miami-based company that creates educational programs to support student curiosity about technology and innovation. By combining an online platform with classroom learning, Stardom Up aims is to improve students’ problem-solving and critical thinking abilities as well as introduce them to Miami’s burgeoning community of technology-driven startups.