April Speight is a developer, speaker, and educator who believes that creating for XR should be accessible for all. Her experience in technical training and developing curriculum spans 10 years in the non-profit sector and now includes the onboarding of developing for XR. Her focus on fundamentals, safety, design principles, and inclusivity serves as the foundation of her approach to educating others. She believes that learning shouldn’t start with building an app or experience, rather, understanding the what, why and impact is the stepping stone to fostering a new generation of developers who are both mindful and strategic throughout the creation process.
Her passion lies in the use and development of AR/VR apps and experiences for educational purposes. Her most notable achievement is her team’s success at the January 2020 MIT Reality Hack. Together, they won Best in Learning, Education and Research, as well as Best in Health and Wellness + Medical for their app Spell Bound, a VR learning experience designed to help children with dyslexia and dysgraphia, learn letter formation, and word recognition. Today, she leads the Spatial Computing technology team at Microsoft within Cloud Advocacy.
With a prior focus on Python, her passion for educating others led her to author two books: Bite-Size Python: An Introduction to Python Programming and Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers.