Cassandra Bernard
2019–20 Award of Distinction · mentor and board member
Founder, Casico Creative
Connect-IT 360 · 501(c)(3) · Tampa Bay
Creating the leaders of tomorrow, today.
Connect-IT 360 runs SharkMakers, Florida’s award-winning student innovation incubator, where student teams build real solutions to real problems, guided by industry mentors.
2,000+Students impacted
$175KIn scholarship & award funds committed
11Consecutive years running
Principal partners
Our mission
SharkMakers is building the next generation of leaders, innovators, and changemakers. Students don’t just learn about innovation, they step into the arena, working alongside industry experts to solve real-world problems, build real products and businesses, and discover what they are capable of creating.
We teach young people to believe in themselves, embrace the art of possibility, and lead with the confidence and courage to build a better world for all abilities.
What we do
This is not a class. It’s a launchpad.
SharkMakers is an immersive, project-based incubator for high school and college students. Teams spend a season taking an idea from a real problem to a product and a pitch, guided by industry mentors and judged by real-world standards.
Human-centric design
Students learn to address 100% of the market and create products accessible to everyone.
Industry mentorship
Beyond theory: hands-on learning from real experts across 12 industries.
Shark Tank pitching
The confidence to pitch like the pros and answer questions from the sharks.
Teamwork
Learn to rely on your team, and become a person your team can rely on.
Compete & win
Teams pitch their way to the top and compete for scholarships and prizes to launch their idea.
High school & collegiate
A Tampa Bay high school season, and SharkMakers Next Gen for college teams from fall 2026.
How to get involved
Four ways in.
Come to an event
Info sessions, Money Smart and more. See the calendar and register for an event, or apply to Next Gen.
Become a mentor
Share your industry experience with a student team across the season.
Partner with us
Fund scholarships, host a workshop, or put your company in front of emerging talent.
Donate
Every gift funds scholarships, workshops and the mentor network. Tax deductible.
The student journey
From a real problem to a Shark Tank ready pitch.
Problem discovery & purpose
Product strategy & validation
UI & UX architecture
Business model & fundraising
Pitch, polish & performance
Alumni
Judged on what happens after it ends.
From SharkMakers to what’s next. Our alumni don’t just leave with an experience. They leave ready to take on the world. They have continued their journeys at Duke, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Georgia Tech, the University of Florida and more, while others have stepped into internships and careers with Apple, Accenture, AWS, Amazon, PayPal, Bank of America, Raymond James and more. We also have alumni who have started their own businesses. They are innovators, entrepreneurs and high-performing talent who know how to think, build, lead and make things happen.
Alex Kranias
2019–20 Award of Distinction · 2020–22 intern
Machine learning engineer at Apple
Marcin Plaza
2021–22 1st Place · 2022–23 2nd Place
Hardware engineer at Midjourney
Our history
How Next Gen Tech 360 became SharkMakers
If you knew this program as Next Gen Tech 360, you are in the right place. Eleven years, three names, one continuous model. Newest first.
2026–2027
SharkMakers Next Gen takes the model to college.
SharkMakers Next Gen brings the SharkMakers experience to the collegiate podium, helping students turn early-stage ideas into real-world products, solutions, and business opportunities.
Launching its inaugural cohort October 2–December 8, 2026, in partnership with the USF Nault Center for Entrepreneurship, students work with industry mentors to validate problems, understand customers, refine their ideas, build the business behind them, and take their thinking to the next level.
2025–2026
Next Gen Tech 360 becomes SharkMakers.
In 2025 the program officially became SharkMakers, reflecting its evolution into a broader innovation and entrepreneurship platform rather than a technology contest with a new name.
Relationships deepened across the corporate, technology, education, philanthropic and entrepreneurial communities - including the Florida High Tech Corridor and the Grant Cardone Foundation.
The season is being documented as a five-episode docuseries with RHS TV, putting the students, their products and the process in front of audiences well past Tampa Bay.
- Renamed SharkMakers
- Florida High Tech Corridor
- Grant Cardone Foundation
- Five-episode docuseries
2024–2025
Accessibility stops being a checklist and becomes the design brief.
The defining shift. Accessibility - physical and digital - moved to the front of the product development process. Students were asked to consider the people who would actually use their products from the first sketch, not after the thing was built.
The approach drew outside validation: a winning student innovation team became the only youth program invited to present at the inaugural WAWABILITY event, alongside enterprise leaders designing for people of all abilities.
The same season brought the program’s first participation from Pasco County.
- Accessibility-first design
- WAWABILITY: only youth program
- Pasco County added
2021–2024
Next Gen Tech 360, and the model outgrows technology.
Under Connect-IT 360, the program matured into Next Gen Tech 360 and expanded well past its original technology focus into a full experiential framework: human-centered design, customer discovery, product strategy, entrepreneurship, business development, marketing, pitch development, fundraising and industry mentorship.
Students stopped competing with technology projects and started thinking like product developers - building real products and working the business around them.
In the 2022–23 season the program expanded into Hillsborough County, establishing a Tampa Bay regional presence.
- Renamed Next Gen Tech 360
- Hillsborough County added
- Nine-discipline framework
2020–2021
Full operational responsibility, taken on in the worst possible year.
In 2020 Connect-IT 360 assumed full operational responsibility for the program, laying the groundwork for expansion past Pinellas County.
Its first full season landed inside the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than suspend programming, the season moved fully virtual - students kept developing ideas, kept working with mentors, kept finishing.
That year is the organization’s clearest evidence of the thing every funder asks about and few can show: it keeps delivering when conditions change.
- First full CI360 season
- Delivered fully virtual
- No season lost
2018–2020
Connect-IT 360 is founded to carry the program.
Connect-IT 360, Inc. was established in 2018 as the 501(c)(3) that would go on to deliver the program.
Throughout, the curriculum, methodology, operations and industry relationships were managed independently of any school district’s curriculum. Schools were the channel for awareness and recruitment - never the owner of the model.
- 501(c)(3) incorporated
- Independent of district curriculum
2015–2018
A technology competition that was teaching the wrong half of the job.
The program's first season ran in 2015–16 as Next Gen Tech, a countywide technology competition run in partnership with the Pinellas Education Foundation.
It surfaced a gap almost immediately. Students had the technical knowledge and none of the practice that actually moves an idea: customers, product development, business strategy, communication, teamwork.
Rather than accept the gap, Robyn Mussler wrote the program’s first proprietary curriculum - turning a competition into an industry-informed product development and entrepreneurship model.
- Pinellas County
- Countywide competition
- First proprietary curriculum
Invest in the next generation of builders.
Connect-It 360, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law, and they fund the scholarships, workshops and mentor network that make the season run.
