Category: group_2014-16

We are so excited here at the Tech Girls Movement as we have received entries for this year’s Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero from more than 80 teams of tech girls from across Australia!

The TGM’s signature campaign Tech Girls Are Superheroes has encouraged and supported 500+ school girls across Australia to build apps for social good in 2016 as part of the Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero competition. The competition builds confidence in young people, and empowers them to build knowledge and expertise in entrepreneurship so they are prepared to build their own futures. Key to the competition is young people solving young people’s problems. At the end of the 12 week program, teams of girls pitch their idea on YouTube, prepare a business plan, and develop a working prototype of an app. Girls from 7-17 years old are participating in 2016.

At 15 years old, last year’s national winning Team Pawsout have just returned from pitching their app in Silicon Valley among other tech girls from around the world at the Technovation world challenge. Their app connects hectic dog owners with teenagers who need exercise and the Tech Girls Movement is supporting the release of their app into the market in September. You can help fund them here via their GoFundMe campaign. Watch their pitch video here.

In 2014 we had 18 girls participate, 132 in 2015 and nearly 500 participants in 2016. All states across Australia are represented. All teams are matched with a real life female mentor.

At the Qld showcase event at QUT, Minister Enoch will announce the State Finalists from across Australia, and present a prize to the Qld finalists on Sunday the 18th of September.

The national winners will be announced at our NSW showcase on Thursday the 29th of September. Our Vic Finalists will be invited to invited their app at our Melbourne event at Xero.

All teams who submitted an entry this year are invited to come to a showcase event and display their app for the audience.

REGISTER HERE! Tickets are going fast. 

We at the Tech Girls Movement just had to post this message we received from one of our valued teachers / coaches in the Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero. Thank you Tracy for sending this, as we know other teachers / coaches are feeling the same. We thank you all for your tremendous efforts this year!

Just dropping you a line to let you know we are almost there with our submissions, from knowing what seemed like very little at the beginning of April to now with just over a week to go. We had never heard of App Inventor, didn’t have an android device and our coding skills were very basic. I have to say the learning, challenges, laughs, frustration at times, elation and pride experienced by all of us has been worth it. Two teams, seven year  six girls, two awesome mentors in Kristina Alberto based in Sydney who is about to give birth any day now and Karen Hutchinson based in Melbourne who arranged for our Golden Girls Team to visit her company’s work office in Brisbane (Rockwell Automation) to take part in their First Robotics Link Up with teams of students they sponsor in other states. This company was so welcoming of our 11 year olds and showed a genuine enthusiasm and interest in their app idea, Bin Possible. Of course there was also the highlight of linking up with you at EduTech and listening to the Baroness. We have also been following your SanFrancisco experience with great excitement on Instagram.

I visited Google, Intel, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft while on a study tour to attend ISTE in 2014 and remember thinking how I would have felt if had the chance to visit places like this as my younger self. It was so inspirational and made me smile to see the PawsOut Girls have the time of their lives during their San Francisco visit via social media. Thanks for sharing so much. You must feel very proud.

When I heard about this awesome movement you have created and attended the showcase event last year I knew for the sake of the girls I teach we just had to enter. Yes it’s been difficult and very challenging at times (I am no spring chicken) but with little more than a week to go, although we know our entries are not perfect as coaches, mentors and teams we have grown. We have been sharing our story via our school newsletter,  and will do a presentation on parade.  The girls are very excited about the showcase event and most will be able to attend. 

Kind regards,

Tracy Sleeman.

(Coach: Golden Girls)

With every organisation, there are always costs. At the Tech Girls Movement, we love it when companies step up to cut costs for the small business owners. One company has massively reduced our shipping costs, where it used to cost us a lot of money to send boxes of books to schools, we have now passed on these savings to recipients of the Tech Girls Are Superheroes books.

Sendle works by allowing you to use their easy quote system, you can start by putting in the details of your delivery job, and you’ll get an instant quote! No need for emails or messy correspondence.

Sendle then easily creates the logged job, where you can print the job run sheet, and put it onto your parcel, leave your parcel out on the day of collection, and you can even track the parcel’s whereabouts!

Sending parcels has never been easier! And we know because we send boxes of books out to schools and young girls around Australia on a weekly basis.

 

The Tech Girls Movement is calling for judges for our app building competition! Over the past 16 weeks, teams of school girls across Australia have been working with a mentor and a coach to build apps for social good. They are competing to become the Next Tech Girl Superhero. 

You don’t have to be an expert in building apps, just have a passion for wanting to help our next generation of entrepreneurs build the technology of the future. You do have to be available in the first 2 weeks of August to do the judging. We expect each entry will take 20-30 minutes to judge and you can do this at any time of day, from anywhere in the world!

Sign up here – thank you! 🙂

You can read about last year’s participants here.

Watch last year’s winning pitches.

Read about last year’s winning Team Pawsout and their July 2016 trip to San Francisco to present their app as part of the global Technovation Challenge!

Our very own Jewella has been invited to contribute a chapter to this fantastic new book which is the brainchild of a real life superhero Dame of Drones Dr. Catherine Ball.

The vision is for a bunch of inspiring stories centered around a moment when we needed to pull out our gumption “shrewd or spirited initiative and resourcefulness”. 

What we love so much about this is how it relates to the concept of a superhero; having that one special unique ability that you pull out when you need it in tough times. Superheroes regularly show their gumption – for examples you just need to read our stories in Tech Girls Are Superheroes 1 & 2 (oh and spoiler alert – there are new stories coming very soon!).

This is an invitation for you to pre-order your copies via our crowd-funding campaign – we are halfway there and need to reach our target or we don’t get any of the funds to do the project.

Please support stories of real life superheroes (like all of you!) here

 Rewards for supporting the crowd-funding campaign

• AU$35 A signed copy of the book posted to your door, fresh off the press.

·       AU$60 Two Signed Books A signed book for you and one for your friend 😉 sent to your door, fresh off the press.

·       AU$100 Signed Book and VIP Launch Party Signed book posted to your door, fresh off the press. Also one ticket to the VIP launch party on the beautiful Gold Coast.

·       AU$100 Melbourne VIP Party and Book A VIP Launch Party ticket and signed book, somewhere fabulous in Melbourne.

·       AU$100 Brisbane VIP Launch & Book Brisbane Launch Party and signed book

·       AU$180 Brisbane VIP 2 tickets & books Brisbane VIP Party for two.. and two signed books

·       AU$180 Melbourne 2 tickets and 2 books Melbourne VIP Party, 2 tickets and 2 books. Networking with amazing people and getting a lovely signed book too 🙂

·       AU$180 Two Books and VIP Launch Party Two signed books posted to your door, fresh off the press. Also two tickets to the VIP launch party on the beautiful Gold Coast.

·       AU$250 Signed Book & Skype Mentoring Signed Book straight to your door, fresh from the presses. Plus, a tailored, 1 hour Skype based mentoring session with Dr Catherine Ball: Award Winner and Entrepreneur.

·       AU$2000 Lunchtime Corporate Gumption Corporate Lunch Meeting for an hour (up to 10 guests). Including a book each (up to 10 books) (Brisbane, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Sydney, Cairns options only) You provide the location and the luncheon; we provide the gumption to the function.

·       AU$4000 Workshop Gumption 4 hour workshop (up to 10 participants) on corporate gumption and business strategy. A book per participant (up to 10 participants). Available SE Queensland, Melbourne, Sydney, Cairns, and Canberra. You provide the location and any refreshments. We provide the gumption, skills, and inspiration.

Tech Girls Movement and Chibitronics are partnering to bring crafting with circuits to the home and classroom!

Chibitronics is an evolution of Jie Qi’s passion for technology and art in the form of paper electronics. She hopes to share this new way of learning circuits and creating art, so that everyone can become technology creators rather than technology consumers.

We recently ordered some kits to play with, and we were immediately hooked! The instructions are very simple to read and understand, and the exercises were fun and we were entertained for a good hour, and this is coming from an adult!

You can now pre-order Chibitronics products from our website. By buying from us you are not only supporting the Tech Girls Movement, you’re also getting a tool set to engage kids to learn circuitry in a fun and interesting way.

You can go to the CHIBITRONICS page to look at the full range of products on offer.

– Akemi Cade, Tech Girls Movement Partnerships Guru

Time to show the world what our Aussie tech girls can do!

If someone would have told me in September 2015 as we were judging the submissions in our second year of the Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero competition that we would be participating in the Technovation global challenge in San Francisco in July 2016, I would not have believed it!

But last week we did! Thanks to TechnologyOne for supporting our trip! Our winning team from 2015, Team Pawsout, are honorary guests in San Francisco at the global Technovation challenge alongside teams from all around the world! In fact, 27 nationalities were represented.

We visited the headquarters of Twitter, Facebook, Intel, Yahoo, Autodesk and Intuit. It was a blast! The team displayed their app among other teams at the University of San Francisco to a wide audience and received some feedback. 

If you haven’t yet heard of Team Pawsout then you are missing out. Watch their pitch video here, and read about their recent adventures here and here. The girls are currently in Year 10 at St. Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School.

Oh and you can read about them in Tech Girls Are Superheroes 2! Get your copy today.

Go Team! More on our excellent adventure soon.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Zero Latency is pleased to support the Search for the Next Tech Girls Superhero competition and offer the highest placed Victorian team a sneak peek into the Virtual Reality industry. 

Zero Latency VR is a Melbourne-based hardware and software developer that allows 6 or more players the opportunity to escape reality – performing super human feats like defying gravity, or exploring new worlds in their 400 square meter free roam Virtual Reality system.  The team at Zero Latency is passionate about the participation of women in the Virtual and Augmented Reality industries, and invites the Victorian winners to our facility in Melbourne for a Playtest and Q+A session with the developers of the software and hardware.  

What a totally cool prize!

Guest Blog Post from Teacher Andrew Russell

Clayfield College – Year 10 Information Technology

“Tech girls are superheroes”

Computing occupations are predicted to make up two thirds of all new jobs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) related fields (Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections, 2015; elaborated by Code.Org, 2015) and Computer Science education has risen to prominence to become a national priority (Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, 2015). Computer education, with a focus on Computer Science, has become a core subject in the Australian Curriculum and the focus of national innovation initiatives. Large scale participation by girls, however, remains unlikely given their low level of engagement with computing in recent decades.

According to the report published in 2015 titled “Female participation in school computing: reversing the trend” there are four specific strategies identified that are most likely to be effective approaches to addressing low participation of females in K-12Computer Science in the current Australian context:

1. Engaging girls in the Digital Technologies Curriculum;

2. Parental preconceptions and influences;

3. Role Models and Mentors; and

4. Digital Technologies activities for girls.

Clayfield College saw the “Tech girls are superheroes” challenge as an opportunity to engage girls and attract them into Technology careers, while teaching them computational, system and design thinking skills. Year 10 Technology students are designing and developing prototype apps. The brief given to the students is to develop an APP that will help the community is some way.  Students are learning to solve problems in creative ways and use technology to help people. They are using either a JQuery mobile framework or the “App Inventor IDE”.  

What has made this unit different and tangible to the students is how it enables them to interact with successful women in IT in industry as mentors, as well as students from other schools. Students are Skyping with their mentors on a regular basis and arranging online meetings or meeting in person at school. In 2016, we have some amazing mentors including: Grace Linsdell – Display Campaign Manager at Xpand (at Google) in Sydney; Monique Alvis (an old girl of Clayfield College) – Senior Consultant (Design and Development) for IBM in Melbourne; Gen George – Founder of not one, but two successful companies – OneShift / Skilled in Sydney; Magda Cortez – Senior Product Manager at eBay / Gumtree in Sydney; Kim Allom – Associate Producer for Defiant Development in the video games industry in Brisbane; Mathilde Desselle -Program coordinator for Marketing and Outreach at the University of Queensland; Michelle Apps – Project Officer at QUT in Brisbane; Veronica Chew – Founder of W Common in Singapore.

The students are able to showcase their Apps at the QUT Cube, enabling them to present their ideas to the public. The unit brings to the students many transferable skills, such as working and problem solving in teams, entrepreneurial skills that include market research, client profiling, product need surveys, cost analysis and project management using an app called “Trello”.  

Examples of student work

http://www.techgirlsmovement.org/pinpoint-team/

http://www.techgirlsmovement.org/first-response-team/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq2tdLV_p70

 The main steps in this unit consist of the following:

1. Career Exploration – Students get to know their mentor by asking questions about their career, using Skype. Theythen seek initial ideas from their mentorand arrange regular Skype meeting times with them.
2. Ideation of concept – Students brainstorm and gather ideas on community issues and problems that can potentially be solved by the use of an APP “Lean Startup”. “A day in the Life” scenario is applied here for feedback from the target group.
3. Students gather feasibility measures and feedback on their App idea from a target group. They design a survey to collect feedback on the app popularity and potential Market Size.
4. Students brainstorm using “Data flowchart” and include basic “wireframes”. This gives a good graphical picture of the number of screens and functionality on each, including data flow.
5. User Interface and Product Design – Paper Prototyping Product Description. Students use a combination of Adobe Illustrator and “Invision”. The following example is the wireframe development by the “First Response” group (see below)
6. Students are made very aware that feedback on paper prototype from peers/potential users is fundamental to the success of their project. Mentors and teachers provide critical feedback at this point in time.
7. Students use a “problem based learning” methodology to work through tutorials and teacher tuition to develop aprototype solution within the appropriate framework, such as Jquery Mobile or App Inventor. Students also develop a database connection with Google Fusion Tables that allowed them to store user data of their App. Students are able to control the typical features of a smart phone including Geolocation, Accelerometer, Gyroscope Database, Bar code scanner, messaging, touch features including swipe, pinch, etc… Many examples and tutorials are available for App inventor and Jquery mobile, in our case using Dreamweaver and Phonegap.
8. Students then revise a competitive analysis and pricing based on publishing costs in the App stores and potential advertising revenues.
9. Finally, the branding and promotion, including a 100-word App description, must be developed. iThis includes a pitch video and demo video of the App.

Students have the opportunity to submit this into the Techgirls are superheroes challenge Australia wide. 

Head of Technology 

Andrew Russell

NOTE from the TGM: Thank you to our superhero teacher Andrew Russell from us here at the Tech Girls Movement for your ongoing support of our program and your many teams. We love having you in the program!

 

 

On Monday this week, our partner company TechnologyOne hosted 8 of our Search or the next tech girl superhero teams in their office Headquarters in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. Six mentors from TechnologyOne who are matched with teams from a local primary school, spent the day guiding them through the process of turning their ideas into a working prototype.

Teams started the day meeting with the mentors and going through the work they had completed so far for the app. Then we watched the codegirl documentary. Then one mentor gave advice to all teams on how to implement different parts of the app in app inventor, like the login screen.

The huge lunch spread put on by the TechnologyOne team kept our energy up. At the end of the session all teams pitched their ideas to the rest of the group, and then we finished the day with a tour of the cool TechnologyOne offices.

It was a really great day. We had so much fun and we can’t wait to do it again! Thanks TechnologyOne.