While I’ve been fascinated with data, numbers, and STEM since my early childhood, I only became technically involved at 11.

My dad worked at Microsoft and frequently pitched Power BI’s applications to potential partners. At dinner one night, he told us he’d be working with LEGO soon. At the time, my brother and I had been infatuated with the colorful bricks and wanted to see if we could get involved.

We decided that instead of letting my dad use his own data sets from other companies, we’d create a LEGO-specific data set just for them!

The following week, we arrived at school armed with a thick stack of paper surveys! I went from classroom to classroom, asking teachers if they could get their students to complete the survey by the end of the week. We made our rounds at the week’s end and collected over 280 surveys!

I had no experience with Power BI, but my dad taught me how to enter the information into an excel table, and that’s what I did. It was painful, but I couldn’t help but admire the array of numbers stacked one on top of one another like LEGOs.

We had earned a seat at the table, literally. During the presentation in the Microsoft Redmond Executive Briefing Center, we sat next to the other executives. We watched our dad show off the analytics and visualizations he created with our data, and at the end, we got a photo with everyone in the room and even a few LEGO sets!