Masters Hosts Entrepreneurial “Diamond Challenge” Competition

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Dylan Glaser (L) and Mason Dwek (R) make their case at the Diamond Challenge

March 4, 2025

By Jeff Wilson–

Amidst the mostly Gothic architecture of Dobbs Ferry’s Masters School is the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, a state-of-the-art Modernist edifice completed in 2023 that houses the school’s new program of the same name. This jewel of a building was also the perfect venue when on March 1, Masters hosted round one of the Diamond Challenge, a worldwide competition that invites high-school students (in teams of two, three or four) to tap into their creative and entrepreneurial skills and develop a product or service that addresses some societal need, then “pitching” it, a la “Shark Tank,” to a panel of three judges.

One of only four locations in the country to stage the Diamond Challenge, the Masters School, now in its second year playing host, welcomed 21 teams from all over the East as well as Texas and Toronto. Masters also put up two teams of its own: Ocean Bloom, a marine biology venture presented by sophomores Gabriela Li and Helen Gao, who both hail from China; and Politiconnect, a watchdog app for concerned citizens, the brainchild of home-grown duo Mason Dwek (a junior from Chappaqua) and Dylan Glaser (a senior from Scarsdale).

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Founded by the University of Delaware’s Horn Entrepreneurship in 2012, the Diamond Challenge encourages ambitious students (“innovators” and “changemakers”) to “unleash” their potential to make a difference. Those participating at the Masters event – 65 or so, all well-dressed and well-prepared –had followed strict guidelines. They’d submitted their concepts between September and January, were accepted in February and scheduled to pitch their projects in a four- or five-week window after that. Armed with Power Point displays, each team made its case within five minutes to a panel of three judges consisting of professors, CEO’s and financial analysts and then field tough questions. Two teams will advance to the Diamond Challenge Finals at the Limitless World Summit in Delaware in May. There are topical prizes, prizes of recognition in either business (focused on revenue) or social innovation (seeking social impact), and cash prizes for the top three teams that achieve both: $12,000, $8,000, and $4,500.

And what sort of innovations have the Diamond Challenge’s challengers conceived? In the business innovation category, The Better Bin team created a product that transforms food waste into odor-free, eco-friendly fertilizer in three to five days. Guardian Band developed as a social innovation a wearable device that detects heart attacks and strokes in real time. Last year both winners in the Masters pitch round, though not Masters students, went on to take second place in the final round. And one of those teams, A Better Kitchen Sink, would succeed in an unlikely way, recounted John Chiodo, Director of Innovation, Engineering and Computer Science at Masters. “Through one of our judges, A Better Kitchen Sink was connected to the United Nations. which sent them to its Development Center in Malawi last summer,” he explained.

Masters’ Ocean Bloom teammates Li and Gao, both scuba divers, chose to address a grave problem in the oceans: the deterioration of coral, whose looming demise threatens not only the diving industry but the actual survival of most marine life. Their ambitious plan is to make coral in a 3-D printer, dive to the ocean floor to a well-known sunken ship off Fire Island and plant their man-made coral among the bleached, dying coral to give it new life. This method, which has already been used successfully at Hong Kong University, also allows them to monitor the coral’s regenerative progress using underwater drones. “Our goal isn’t to make money; it’s to protect the environment,” Li stated.

Dwek and Glaser of Politiconnect have vastly different goals, involving government. Their aim is to identify unresponsive, self-serving elected officials who are ignoring their uninformed constituents and motivate the latter to get become informed and become more vigilant. The boys have created a phone app that enables users to monitor elected representatives. The app has a database of over 9,000 politicians in state or federal government.

Users can monitor politicians’ attendance, voting patterns or committee activity. They can read about bills and track their progress toward passage. This level of citizen involvement, Dwek argues, will challenge underperforming elected leaders to wake up and do what voters want, which is to serve the people.

Although Politiconnect didn’t bring home the gold (neither did Oceanbloom), Dwek and Glaser aren’t disappointed. Sharing his thoughts on being an also-ran, Dwek allowed: “The performance felt great,” he said. “We were happy to be there, to know that our idea was good enough to compete with the top of the top. Just to get to that round, we’d already won. We had nothing to lose.”