On Monday, 13th of November, our Bully Busters team from Shelford Girls’ Grammar in Victoria, our primary school state winners in the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero, visited The Age office in Melbourne. Fairfax Media, being one of our long-time partner organisations, offered the girls the opportunity to come into their office and meet their Chief Information Officer, Robyn Elliot.

This was truly a great opportunity for our tech girls to not only share details about the innovative App that they built, but to get great career advice on how to move forward into a STEM career.

We are super-proud of our Bully Busters team who created a solution to an important problem in their local community. They are proud Ambassadors of the Tech Girls Movement and are a great example of our bright future.

On Monday the 2nd of October, we hosted our first ever competition showcase in New Zealand. Thanks to Xero for hosting this fabulous event where many of our teams showcased the apps they built in the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero Competition.

The event in Wellington was well attended by 60 participants from all over New Zealand. Some even travelled from Dunedin! Many of our teams presented the awesome apps that they built this year, with an added opportunity to talk directly with the community about the impact that their apps can make to the lives of everyone around them.

Our winning teams Evac-u-buddy from Wellington and Drink Minder from Hamilton presented their apps to the eager audience. Diana Jones, who donated prizes for the winning teams, was accompanied by one of our very won superheroes, Anna Divoli.

We have our second New Zealand showcase on Saturday, October 28th at SIGNAL ICT Graduate School in Christchurch. We would love to see you there!

Tickets are limited so Register Now!

We received so many incredible entries this year in the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero competition.

If you haven’t yet met our winners and finalists, you can find them here.

Our techgirls are building awesome apps to solve problems in their local community. Some apps will have more impact than others, thus we have established our inaugural Tech Girls Are Superheroes Game Changer Award for the team we feel at the Tech Girls Movement will have an extra special impact not only on the team’s local community but on society as a whole.

We see the apps our tech girls build as solutions to important problems.

This year the winning team of the Game Changer award is Team Helpa who created an incredible app and business plan to connect charitable homeowners to the homeless population. The team is from St. Aidan’s Anglican Girls School in Brisbane.

Their app allows the homeless to work in partnership with the community so stereotypes are broken and friendships built. People will outsource tasks directly to local homeless clients allowing a mutually beneficial situation. Users can negotiate their own rates of payment or exchange. This is a healthy way for the homeless to reconnect with society whilst productively putting their skills and hobbies to use. To create revenue, the team will sell merchandise, collect donations and show advertising.

Most of all, these girls want to make a change, one phone at a time.

I’m sure you will agree that this team of girls has set the standard very high with their concept, their app and the research behind it. We are sure you will agree that they are very worthy recipients of our very first Tech Girls Are Superheroes Game Changer App!

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With research suggesting that girls opt out of STEM at six-years-old, we at the Tech Girls Movement feel that it is important to educate young people from a young age as to the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths), and innovation and adventure from a young age.

You may be familiar with our Tech Girls are Superheroes books, which are aimed at girls between 7 and 17. With 56, 000 copies of our Tech Girls are Superheroes books 1 & 2 distributed across Australia and New Zealand; we are super excited to launch our next book online!

In collaboration Like a Photon, another Brisbane based creative organisation, we have launched our Tech Heroes Island on the Kindergo App, which is currently free for download on the Apple store. The reason we wanted to work with Like a Photon is to engage children from a young age about the amazing science and technology adventures they can embark on, but also to present real-life female role models to girls as they are learning about the world.

These strong, creative and innovative characters, including Jewella, Violet Ninja, Dragonfly and Scriptrix are a fun way to think about our digital futures.

Designed for children aged 2 to 7 years, these fantastic stories not only teach children to read by having an audible component when clicking on each word, but they’re also beautifully illustrated by our very own Dan Heck and Like a Photon’s illustrator, Costa Daniel.

We’re offering you the opportunity to get yourself a copy of Kindergo and our brand new Tech Heroes Island for free, for a limited time, and come and join us at the State Library of Queensland, once again on the 7th of October to officially launch the Kindergo app and our Tech Heroes Island.

Who knows, you may even spot a superhero!

Register here for the Kindergo event

We love bringing you stories direct from our Tech Girls themselves! Get a taste of what one of our teams experienced in the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero with a blog post that the Helping Hands Tech Girls Team wrote themselves – we are so proud of Helping Hands and all of our teams this year. These girls crack us up!

Helping Hands Blog

Week 1 :

In week 1, we all came to Lily’s house to brainstorm ideas for our app. At first we all wanted to do a refugee app, but then we looked at a document and we didn’t really know anyone who was a refugee. Then we came down to the decision

that we’ll do some of the other ideas. We all watched a video on what it was like to be Tech Girl. We all knew that we were going to have the best time ever making a app.

Week 2:

So on week two we did a Google Hangout with Tasa, Michelle and Ruth from Salesforce (our mentors) we all shared our ideas, introduced ourselves and told them all the topics we had to choose from. They suggested that if we did a refugee app it would be very hard to research all of the facts and know what it’s like to be a refugee. So then we settled on our second idea for a confidence app. We choose to create a confidence app because we did some research and found out the girls in Australia are most stressed in the world. This is why we should do this topic.

Week 3:

In week 3, we did a Google Hangout with our mentors again and finalised our positions. Summer was the coding director, Mia was the research director, Lily was the creative director and Ruby was the business director. We all set out a brief plan for our app. At first we decided to call it Journey To Happyness. But then we had to change the name to HappyNess because it didn’t fit as a logo.

Week 4:

Today we searched through the Google Play Store and the App Store for apps that were like the one we were going to create. We found three other similiar apps like ours but there none exactly like ours which was a very good sign at the time. But the sad thing was we found out that Ruth and Michelle had left Salesforce. Michelle left to go on a holiday and Ruth wanted to go and work for another company. Tasa introduced us to a coding program called App Inventor. We built our app in this program. But you could only test it on Android devices, so Karen (our coach) bought a Samsung phone so we can use it for testing.

Week 5:

In week 5, we researched how other people have tried to solve the problem. We learnt that Australian kids are the most stressed kids on earth so we thought meditation, happy music, friendly messages, laughter and friendship would be simple things we could do to overcome stress. These 5 things we found most calming and lifting. Summer thought another solution that could be inspirational quotes. We planned to target this app at girls aged 5-13 (so in primary school). The only thing is that if you are older or younger you can still use our cool app.

Week 6:

This week we were focusing on a basic plan for the app. Tasa came over to Lily’s house to teach us how to use App Inventor. Then we started to plan the look. So it was official that our app was going to be called HappyNess, it was made to help primary aged girls who struggle with confidence and making friends. This we thought it was very important to us to help other people in ways that was fun.

Week 7:

This week, we made our business plan and Lily made some wireframes. We settled for a theme of aqua and purple. We thought those colours represented calmness and fun. We started with the basics on our app e.g the home page, the colours and how many pages of it. That was what Summer and Mia were doing. We started testing out placing images on the app e.g emojis and happy faces.

Week 8:

This week was all about the business plan. We were working out how our logos would look. Ruby and Tasa were looking through the App Store and Google Play Store for apps like ours. Luckily, there was nothing quite like our plans. Mia and Summer played around with App Inventor and created our “How are You Feeling” Page. Lily, as the creative director, looked online for free logo creators, and of course it was a success! Now we have a fabulous logo for our app.

Week 9:

This week was a really fun week. This week, we planned our pitch video. Some scenes were skit and some scenes were info about our app. It was going to be very persuasive and be funny but tells you the info! Those are all the things you need for a good pitch, right? Of course we’re right! We are the one and only team Helping Hands! LOL. We still did a little work on the app and after the few weeks we had it was in really good shape. We left this week pretty happy.

Week 10:

This week, everyone came to Mia’s house to finalise our business plan. We did really well, with a lot of food and water we managed to have a really fun session and almost completed our business plan. We all worked on how we’ll advertise our app without vandalizing public property so we thought we’ll start with a small crowd with 210 people (all the girls in our school). Everything went really smooth this week.

Week 11:

This had to be the BEST week ever! We all took the train into the city to Salesforce to film our pitch! It was amaz-balls! We had never ending snacks and really cool conference rooms to work in! Lily made a script the day before so we can learn our lines for the pitch and be confident. Everyone especially Summer loved the work spaces! We won’t go through the whole process of filming but let us tell you this, it was fantastic! Here’s a link to our pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upFdvIupY3A.

Week 12:

In week 12, we were a little late for the demo so we quickly made a good one narrated by the one and only Ruby! Mia had brought a cake to celebrate with for finishing which we all loved! We fixed all the bugs in our app and changed the theme to just a peachy pink colour. It was much more calming and friendly. Our demo video was very instructive and helpful if you don’t know how to use our app. Here’s a link to our demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7hwcyKLEr0&t=6s

Sadly, our Tech Girls journey has ended and we wish it could last forever. Helping Hands would like to thank Tech Girls Movement for this amazing opportunity and we wish all the other Tech Girls, mentors and coaches the best for the end. We’d like to thank Tasa Markovski our mentor for helping us make our amazing app and just generally encouraging! Thanks to Karen Taylor for being a great coach and organising all our sessions and taking her good time for us. But most of all we’d like to thank Tech Girls Movement for giving us a place in the NSW Finalists!!!!!!!!!!!! We’d love to win and help other girls gain confidence. Our app is on the Google Play Store for free and is called HappyNess. Thanks for reading our Tech Girls Blog, from Helping Hands!

Congratulations Tech Girls, Coaches, and Mentors! It’s been a fruitful 2017 for us at Tech Girls Movement. We’ve had 1000+ girls, 260+ teams and 250+ mentors participating this year, more than ever since we started the competition in 2014. For the first time this year, we also launched the competition in New Zealand!

Every team has produced a good and worthy app, and it was not an easy judging process. Kudos to all the girls for working hard over the last few months to come up with a meaningful app that helps your local community. Even though the competition has ended, we hope that this will mark the start of your journey to make use of technology for the good of others! We invite you to submit your app to the Technovation Challenge when it opens on the 4th of October. We are here to help you!

We are delighted to announce the National and State winners in the Primary and Secondary categories of the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero. Well done teams!

NATIONAL WINNERS IN AUSTRALIA

PRIMARY

SUNFUN – Pacific Pines Primary School, Queensland. Designed to help kids understand the importance of sun safety in a fun manner. https://youtu.be/ujCYd4y3G3s

SECONDARY

SECONDARYV LINK – St Peter’s Girls School, South Australia. V Link is a mobile application connecting the skilled but underutilized retired population to volunteering jobs. https://youtu.be/uL0fW8sLf78

NATIONAL WINNERS IN NEW ZEALAND

PRIMARY

EVAC-U-BUDDY – Queen Margaret College, Wellington. Helping people who live in Tsunami unsafe zones or in any area at risk of danger find shelter during an evacuation. http://www.evac-u-buddy.com/

SECONDARY

DRINK MINDER – Hillcrest High School, Hamilton. Users can record and track the number of standard drinks they’ve consumed and see their progress as they go. https://youtu.be/btWtGI_g4UE

STATE WINNERS IN AUSTRALIA

PRIMARY

BULLY BUSTERS – Shelford Girls Grammar, Victoria. An anti-bullying app for primary school students who are victims, bystanders or bullies. https://youtu.be/-WLABW0Mhas

HAPPYNESS – St Joseph’s Como, New South Wales. Research has shown that Australian kids are the most stressed kids on Earth. A girls’ confidence can quickly disappear when things go wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7hwcyKLEr0 – joint winners

TALK TO THE HAND – CC Home School, New South Wales. Learn AUSLAN (AUstralian Sign LANguage) through videos, pictures, quizzes, songs and games. https://youtu.be/oZELW12G7r8 – joint winners

SUNFUN – Pacific Pines Primary School, Queensland. Designed to help kids understand the importance of sun safety in a fun manner. https://youtu.be/ujCYd4y3G3s

THE HEALTHY EMOJI – All Saints College, Western Australia. Solves the problem keeping healthy through playing a game. https://vimeo.com/227366973/f1702b401a

POKET.I – Black Forest Primary School, South Australia. Equipping children with financial sense by teaching them that money doesn’t grow on trees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wtlggrWuIU&feature=player_embedded

SECONDARY

STEPC02 – Virtual Team, across Victoria & New South Wales. Teaches children how to care for the environment and make responsible decisions. https://youtu.be/tb0zAypJyOs

ANIGRAM TRAKKA – Santa Sabina College Strathfield, New South Wales. Assisting researchers and conservationists to track koalas. https://youtu.be/jeLmWr9W5Qc

CALME – Brigidine College, Queensland. Assisting teenage students in relieving the effects of stress, depression, and low-esteem that may be associated with school, social media, family, peers and other pressures. https://youtu.be/1mFDqwHnFIc

LET’S TALK – Shenton College, Western Australia. Something needs to be done in order to prevent tragic incidents of teen suicide. Let’s Talk aims to help the close inner circle community of a young teen who has a mental illness. https://youtu.be/KVfjifLJdaI

SECONDARYV LINK – St Peter’s Girls School, South Australia. Our product, V Link is a mobile application connecting the skilled but underutilized retired population to volunteering jobs. https://youtu.be/uL0fW8sLf78

REGION WINNERS IN NEW ZEALAND

PRIMARY

EVAC-U-BUDDY – Queen Margaret College, Wellington, North Island. Helping people who live in Tsunami unsafe zones or in any area at risk of danger find shelter during an evacuation. http://www.evac-u-buddy.com/

THREE MAKAREWA BEES TEAM – BEEFRIEND PI – Makarewa School, Invercargill, South Island. Making it fun to learn about bees while increasing knowledge about the decreasing bee population. https://youtu.be/H9P9N9oP7OE

SECONDARY

DRINK MINDER – Hillcrest High School, Hamilton, North Island. Users can record and track the number of standard drinks they’ve consumed and see their progress as they go. https://youtu.be/btWtGI_g4UE

ON TRACK DUNEDIN – Columba College, Dunedin, South Island. Improves the health of Dunedin citizens by encouraging them to complete walking tracks around Dunedin. https://youtu.be/U1ulwaNTe8U

Our Australian Primary and Secondary winning schools in the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero competition will receive a Creative Set of Magformers!

Thank you to our partners Magformers Australia who were Winners of the prestigious Australian Toy Association’s Educational Toy of the Year Award 2016!

Set contains 90 pieces and an Idea Booklet! With 90 pieces, consisting of 13 different shapes, including spherical shapes, you can create anything your imagination allows! Valued at $241.90

https://www.magformers.com.au/product/creative-set/

If you order Magformers via our site, not only do you receive a 10% discount but we also receive 10% of the purchase price as a donation! Order now.

Children’s Storytelling App, “Kindergo” Creates STE(a)M Content for Early Readers.

Hey, everyone, it’s Amy Parry, the Product Manager for Kindergo, doing a Kindergo TAKEOVER of Tech Girls Are Superheroes to deliver some very exciting news!

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Tech Hero stories are now available for our youngest STE(a)M superstars!

Kindergo, a children’s storytelling app, has partnered with “Tech Girls Are Superheroes” to create 5 digital books for early readers to discover. We have taken some of our favourite Tech Girl Superheroes and imagined what they might have been like when they were just starting out on their STE(a)M journey. Children aged 2-7 will delight in these interactive digital books created especially for them.

The 5 books that are FREE for you to discover TODAY, by downloading Kindergo from the App Store, are :

*(only currently available on 3rd Generation iPad or above)

I Want To Be…

Learn about what our Tech Heroes want to be when they grow up!

Scriptix Can Draw That

Scriptix beats boredom by drawing dazzling designs on her tablet. Things get super cool when Scriptix discovers she has the power to make her designs real!

Dragonfly and the Cool Cubby House

Dragonfly has an amazing idea to create something cool out of discarded items. She uses her surprise super powers to build something amazing.

Jewella’s Ant Adventure

Jewella and her brother Josh are having a picnic when they get invaded…by ants! Jewella has to use her superpower to learn more about ants and why they are so important.

Violet Ninja and the Time Hacking Robot

Violet Ninja is a programming genius, but doesn’t like doing history homework…Her Robot, Jimmy tries to help, by getting her out of homework, but is Violet Ninja really a cheat?

Kindergo have designed the Tech Hero books so that even our youngest Tech Heroes can be inspired by our Tech Girls’ adventures. Kindergo delivers Tech Hero content on a beautifully designed STE(a)M themed island, with a cute, customisable Avatar to help guide their reading experience. Once a book has been discovered, the reader will be able to listen to the story and read along, or try to read the story themselves with a unique “tap-and-hear” feature. This function will help adventurous readers feel empowered to read stories that interest them but may be above their reading skill level.

We are so excited about the opportunity to bring amazing STE(a)M stories to our youngest readers! I can’t wait to hear what you all think. Follow Kindergo Kids on Facebook and Instagram and tell us!

Come along to our QUT showcase this Sunday to meet Clinton from Obelisk Systems and his fabulous robots!

Clinton and his team make a coding and robotics platform that lets teachers draw on the knowledge and experience they have gained through study and experience as engineers. StarLAB is their all in one STEM coding and robotics platform that allows teachers of any technical skill level teach students how to use code to interact with the real world and learn some physics and maths along the way.

Every time Clinton mentions that he love maths, he usually gets some pretty odd looks from the people around him. Sometimes they will even tell him with pride that they “did not have the right brain for maths’ or “you don’t need math, when would I ever solve for X?”. The truth is that he was once one of those people. It was not until he started to study Engineering that he began to see the beauty of mathematics and how useful it is in his everyday life. It is a very rare day when he’s not scribbling some equation down to find some unknown value.

He says he wasted a lot of his life thinking he hated maths because he was never given the context, and this is why he now loves what they are doing at Obelisk Systems so much. They work together with the Me Program in the regional NSW to make resources that not only give students, but also teachers, a fun way to learn coding and make cool robots but also gives them the STEM skills in a context that is fun and useful.

The process for making this platform, like any good systems in computer engineering, by making smaller parts that work together to an experience that is fun, educational, and will innovate your own solutions.

The first “Block” in the StarLAB system is the sensor platform, this small piece of hardware has a lot of different ways in which it can see the world. We have taken the hard work out of wiring up these sensors so now all you need to do is write a single line of Python or drag a scratch block in and you can be getting real data from one of the sensors or camera and using it in your code.

The next part of our program is the online learning platform, for this, they needed to call in some help. They are very good engineers, but they knew very little about teaching. So they called in our TGM partner Dr Scott Sleap in the Me Program, to help develop a program that went beyond just code, but that will teach you physics and maths as well. To make these lessons even better they recorded videos that will take you through all the science and for the teachers we have made a lesson plan that maps the iSTEM curriculum outcomes (and the National Digital Technologies Curriculum).

Next is teacher training. The hardest part of any new thing is taking the first step so they now offer training so you can have them come and help you take that first step. They will show you how to setup your StarLAB, get started with coding in scratch and python, using StarLAB as a data logger, and help you come up with ways that you can integrate StarLAB and coding into may cross curricular activities.

Like any other good system, theirs is modular and designed to grow and be expanded over time to fit the what is needed. They like to hear from our teachers, and they love to make new additions that improve their experience of the StarLAB program. If you are interested in becoming one of their teachers or want to tell them how you think they could make our platform better, you can contact them through discover@starlab.education

We are super excited to be working with the amazing Diana Jones has donated $1000 for the NZ secondary winners and $500 for NZ primary winners for winning the 2017 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero competition! So very cool!

This year is our first in New Zealand and we were blown away with the entries! We recently announced the finalists and the winning teams from New Zealand will be announced at our SOLD OUT Brisbane Showcase on Sunday the 3rd of September.

Stay tuned for details of our New Zealand showcase/s!

Get a copy of Diana’s fantastic leadership book here.