Technovation Challenge

​A couple of weeks ago the winners of the 2015 Technovation challenge were announced.  For those who don’t know, the Technovation Challenge is a global entrepreneurship competition for girls in middle school and high school.  Teams of girls must design and build a mobile app that solves a problem in their community.  In addition to creating the app, they must also create a video pitch, demo video, and write a business plan for their app.  It is truly a global competition, and was exciting to see that teams of girls from 60 different countries entered the competition.  My students created an app called Politics on Point to get teens more involved in politics and be more politically informed.  It was a phenomenal process and at the end of the process, my students were transformed. The high school winners were a team from Nigeria, below is their video pitch.

As participants we were able to see all of the apps created by other teams.  I acted as a judge for the Asia teams and was so inspired by all the apps that I judged.  One that really touched my heart was created by a team from India.  This group of girls was from the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai where community problems for women and girls are pretty serious and that’s what they chose to focus on with their app Women Well Being.  Competitions like this are at the heart of getting more girls thinking early about careers in technology and leveling the playing field in computer science.

This was my proudest moment in all my years as an educator.  The Technovation Challenge was precisely that, a challenge.  My students not only had to come up with a good idea for a mobile app, they also had to design and program it, write a business plan, and create a video pitch and demo video.  This was such an empowering project on so many levels.  It was amazing at the end to see all the apps created by teams of girls around the world.   It has really opened my eyes to an important means of teaching teens important computer science skills.  Mobile app development hits on so many important concepts within computer science and I am looking forward to further developing this curriculum and learning more about mobile app development.  Here is the demo of the app my students created.   The prototype is also available on the Google Play store.