Iridescent is a 501c3 non-profit that brings together scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and teachers. We believe that children who are encouraged to be curious, daring, and driven stand the best chance at success in life. One of our core programs is Technovation Challenge, which equips girls to become technologically literate. We want girls worldwide to initiate and lead disruptive innovations. Leveraging technology is the only way to do so. Technology enables an individual to have global impact at low cost in short time frames.
We are starting a movement — a movement of women creating and inventing technological solutions. We need each of you to be with us each step of this journey.
In this video, Ben Horowitz (one of the most innovative entrepreneurs) talks about how the future of mankind depends on Technovation Challenge girls.
Anuranjita Tewary founded Technovation Challenge in 2009 after attending Startup Weekend. Dr. Tewary wanted to offer girls the opportunity to learn how to start a company and become high-tech entrepreneurs. Technovation Challenge has doubled in size every year since it started.
The program began in 2010 in Mountain View, CA with 45 girls and expanded to Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose in 2011 (232 girls) and 2012 (520 girls). Over the past three years more than 800 high-school girls have programmed 163 mobile phone apps and learned to launch a startup company. 94% of these girls are now interested in a career in technology.
Two winning apps are on the market for free:
We are opening the competition this season for global participation with the goal of reaching 1,000 girls.
Help us reach this goal by supporting a team of high school girls. All you need is five high school girls, a safe place to meet, a laptop with internet and a smart phone (costs ~$50). There is no cost to participate in the program, only tremendous rewards.
We provide the entire curriculum that you can step through with the girls and videos of leading women entrepreneurs such as Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo), computer scientists, and programmers from companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
We want to build a movement of mighty women who tackle the world’s biggest problems, and need your support to scale up. Our goal is to annually engage 200,000 girls worldwide in Technovation Challenge and give them powerful experiences that help them become leaders and inventors.
The quickest way to become a part of this movement is to start a team. This is how!
Technovation Challenge provides a life changing experience to girls — they experience success in a field they never thought they could contribute to, let alone succeed in.
For the 2013 challenge, girls develop an app that solves a problem in their local community. This could be a health problem that affects their community, a social problem, or even a lack of a resource.
Over 12 weeks, girls step through an online curriculum (hosted on P2PU) that helps them develop a potential solution and program a mobile phone application to solve it. They learn how to study their competition, identify ways in which they can gather users, and strategize to earn revenue.
They develop a business plan and pitch their ideas (through video) to a regional online competition.
Regional winners will travel to California to compete at the Technovation World Pitch event on May 2nd, 2013. The winning team will receive $10,000 in funding and support to complete app development and release their app on the market.
Here is the rationale behind our curriculum: Rationale
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