These Students Find Out What It’s Like to Run in Someone Else’s Shoes

There is nothing quite as inspiring as watching your country’s Olympic team parade into the stadium behind their flag or seeing the amazing feats accomplished by the athletes.
Well, now with a partnership between Classroom Champions and Google Glass, some students will be able to see what it is like to compete like an athlete.
Started by Olympic bobsled gold-medalist Steve Mesler and Leigh Mesler Parise in 2009, Classroom Champions brings together athletes and students in kindergarten through eighth great at high-needs schools. During its inaugural academic year of 2011-2012, the group had five Olympians and two Paralympians working with 28 classrooms. As of the 2012-2013 school year, that number had increased to 35 classrooms and a pilot classroom in Costa Rica.
Working as mentors, each athlete adopts three to 10 classrooms per year and sends video lessons or participates in live video chats with the classroom a few times each month. Although the videos correspond with everyday school lessons – letter writing, reading, geography, math and technology – they add a new dimension to the everyday, mundane classroom activities. These athlete-mentors don’t teach from a textbook, but through their own personal experiences. They document their journeys, emphasizing how hard-work, training, goal setting, leadership, competition and, most of all, perseverance are the keys to success.
The goal? To inspire these children to dream and strive to achieve the impossible.
And now, thanks to Google, Classroom Champions is pushing it to the next level by giving their students the chance to see the world through the eyes of a blind Paralympian jumper Lex Gillette.
This year, Google launched its Giving Through Glass competition, which awards five winners with a pair of Google Glass, a $25,000 grant, Google Glass developers and a visit to the Google headquarters.
Classroom Champions is one of those recipients. Their plan is to have Paralympians wear Google Glass so that students can understand what it is like to live and compete with a disability. More importantly, however, it is showing how their determination and abilities, not their disabilities, defines these athletes.
For Gillette, the opportunity to share his experience is once in a lifetime.
“There’s a lot of things that go on with that, having someone basically directing me down this runway, and I’m running fast, he’s making calls on the fly,” Gillette told Fast Co. Exist. “I think it would definitely be cool [for kids to] see how all of that happens, see what that would look like in a visual sense.”
While most will never compete at this level like Gillette, Classroom Champions and Google Glass is helping these students to visualize their own track to success.
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When This Armless Paralympian Couldn’t Feed His Family, He Took Up a Hobby That Changed His Life

Matt Stutzman was born without his arms, but like most kids growing up in rural Fairfield, Iowa, he learned to drive early, and he told Tom McGhee of the Denver Post, “The only accident I was in was when they hit me because they were staring at my feet.” The silver medal-winning Paralympic archer was in Denver last week, telling his inspirational story to disabled people at the Laradon School.
Stutzman had always been an athlete, growing up playing soccer, football, and basketball, as well as hunting. But he didn’t start the sport that would make him well-known until 2010, when he couldn’t find a job, and didn’t know how he was going to feed his wife and kids. It wasn’t the right season to hunt deer with a rifle, but bowhunting was allowed, so his father bought him a bow, and soon he was able to bring home venison for his family.
From the first time Stutzman competed against archers with both arms, he excelled, and a company offered to buy him a bow and become his sponsor. Stutzman sold his old bow to support his family, and used the new one to practice eight hours a day. The sport took him to the Paralympics in London in 2012, where he won the silver medal in archery, losing by a few points to a Jere Forsberg, a wheelchair-bound competitor from Finland.
One of the students Stutzman spoke to, Bryttney Lint, told Tom McGhee, “He touched my heart, he changed my perspective.”
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This Veteran Suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury in Iraq. Now He’s Got a Chance to Win a Medal

All the athletes who qualify for the Paralympics have overcome obstacles to excel at their sports, but perhaps none more so than Army veteran Joel Hunt, who was named to the U.S. Paralympic Alpine Ski Team on Wednesday. Joel Warner profiled Hunt’s quest to make the team last year for Westword, writing, “during his three Iraq deployments, Hunt was exposed to more than 100 improvised explosive-device blasts, explosions that left him with a traumatic brain injury that, among other things, has slowly paralyzed his left leg.” Hunt had to use a wheelchair to get around after his 2007 discharge, and PTSD hit him hard—in a speech he often gives about his story, he says there were times he “wished that I had died in Iraq rather than face the difficulties of my situation.”
But then in 2008, when his health had been deteriorating for years, his parents encouraged him to attend a three-day event in Breckenridge, Colo. to help vets with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) learn to ski. Hunt had begun to leave his wheelchair for walks, and although he was skeptical about skiing, when he tried it, it appealed to him immediately. “Hold on,” Hunt told Warner he remembers thinking, “This is like roller skating.” Operation TBI Freedom bought him a ski pass, and Hunt skied 125 times that winter.
The next winter, Hunt began training at the National Sports Center for the Disabled’s program at Winter Park. The Challenged Athletes Foundation’s Operation Rebound donated the $3500 fee required to participate. Hunt kept at it, improving at ski racing year by year, and in 2013 he qualified for the Paralympic Alpine Development Program in Aspen.
Even with a paralyzed left leg and double vision, Hunt can speed down the slopes, and now he will be the first Paralympic skier with a TBI. He’ll join three other veterans on the Paralympic Alpine Ski Team: Army veteran Heath Calhoun, Coast Guard Veteran Chris Devlin-Young, and Marine Corps veteran Jon Lujan. These vets will head to Sochi to compete at the Paralympic Winter Games from March 7 through 16, offering ski racing fans plenty to cheer about.
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