At Los Altos High School, the Business, Entrepreneurship, and Math Club (BEAM) held an event during ACT last Friday, February 9, welcoming German students on an exchange program. The students presented ideas for business apps that they had been working on for months.

BEAM is an international organization that focuses on how to best construct business proposals and use math analysis. To host this event, students at Los Altos partnered with a high school in Heidelberg, Germany as part of BEAM’s foreign exchange program.

“We’ve been collaborating and working with them since the beginning of the year,” club president senior Jennifer Cruden said. “We’ve been meeting with them online to work on our group projects, which are focused on tackling big problems.”

The exchange is meant to help students from both Heidelberg and LAHS research how business works in different cultures.

“One feature of being in BEAM is that we have the ability to connect with our international partners,” senior Manu Shankar said. “We already talked to them a lot earlier in the year, but this meeting finally let us discuss our business projects in person.”

There were three projects showcased: EZY, an app that simplifies local travel and gives users specific itineraries, We Cook, an app that aims to limit food waste and CareMAX, which makes dermatology and skin care products quick and accessible.

On Saturday, both LAHS and Gunn High School students held a breakfast with the German students in downtown Los Altos.

As a part of a future exchange program, a handful of LAHS students will be headed to Germany in April. The members will finish their business projects and pitch them to different German schools.

BEAM is open to any LAHS students interested in learning about business and analytics.

“The goal is to teach students how math applies to the business world, and then actually provide them with real-world opportunities to apply that knowledge,” Jennifer said.