1st place at Technovation Challenge, or how mentoring experience changed my life
In 2017 I had the priceless opportunity to mentor team for Technovation Global Challenge. It was an exciting journey lasted for about one year, where I learned and experienced a bunch of things I could not even imagine. In this article, I will try to explain in details what Technovation is, and how being a team mentor changed my life.
What is the Technovation Challenge? Technovation is a global initiative to support and teach girls around the world to code, build a mobile application in order to solve social problems with the help of technology. Young girls need to build teams up to 5 participants, find some idea which solves one of the global problems and tries to implement the solution from a technological perspective. The website contains curriculum which includes all stages as ideation, business plan creation, pitching, marketing, and the most important teaches how to code.
This challenge is being conducted for the last eight years, and gathered around 23,000 participants from about 100 countries in this period of time.
Background Story
In 2016 one team from Kazakhstan went through all stages and had an opportunity to participate at World Pitch. I was super proud of the girls’ inspiring achievement. So next year, when I volunteered to teach motion design for children in American Corner my friend and lead coordinator of Maker Space invited me to become co-mentor for Technovation with her. I agreed without any doubt. Our team was formed from six girls: four talented young girls, and two mentors. Each girl had a unique set of skills and talents, that is why our team was diversified. This is how our journey began.
What is the role of the mentor?
The main goal of the mentor is to guide girls in all stages of product development and teach them coding, business plan creation in support to Technovation curriculum. Both of us had a background in STEM, which was helpful in further teaching. Being a mentor requires your full dedication to tasks, enough time to spend each day in a period of approximately six months, being ready to answer specific questions, finding ways and responsibility toward girls in the team.
How we chose the idea?
Probably, it was the most interesting part of the product development. We had to monitor social problems in our society, to outline the most significant ones, and the ones which we could somehow manage to solve using technology. After all, we come up with the idea to track the routes of the children, to make sure they are in safety.
The next stage was the identification of our target audience, and we tried to create personas of our possible users, use cases development and starting wireframing of the application. The number of surveys and interviews were conducted by girls to understand the key functionality of the app.
Benchmarking of similar solutions and competitor analysis helped us to realize which direction we should develop more. The development of the application itself, I mean coding was one of the hardest parts since girls just started learning it. Additionally, we decided to create hardware after initial presentation feedbacks.
Regional Pitch and Online Selection
After a long development stage, we had a regional pitch. It was a very responsible part of the whole process, and girls tried to put all their effort to prepare. We almost didn’t sleep the night before the pitch, but finally, when we were announced winners all of this seemed worthy.
Passing through regional pitch enabled our team to participate in the online selection. When online selection results came out, we could not even believe that we are one of the 6 teams selected to participate at the final World Pitch in San Francisco, Mountain View.
It meant that we have this unique chance to show and present our mobile application in a global setting. Also, it meant that we should continue working on our project until we went to World Pitch.
The World Pitch 2017
Almost 20 hours flight, and finally we were in San Francisco, the capital of IT. Tech giants headquarters as Google and Facebook were spread everywhere. Each team presented their solutions, and seeing their level of preparation our team thought we have no chance, but kept working.
The Technovation team prepared numbers of useful workshops before the World Pitch. Moreover, our team had an amazing opportunity to present our idea to Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.
Finally, when the senior division team winner was announced, we could not even believe it was our team. This win was very significant for us to believe in ourselves more, and see the results of our work.
What is important to consider?
Here I would like to outline some important points to consider before starting to work on your project based on our experience:
- Try to form as more diversified team as possible. During the project development, there would be tasks as coding, business plan creation, and video filming. So, it is helpful to take it into account in forming the team.
- Spend more time on researching the project idea. Try to identify pain points in your society, identify the needs of your possible target audience and do interviews, surveys to gather important data.
- Rely on Technovation curriculum. Technovation provides thorough curriculum, with educational content which will be helpful for girls to learn, and for mentors to plan the project development stages and understand what is required to be delivered.
- Build proper communication inside the team. There were some stress points when girls had leakage of time due to graduating exams. That is why planning and communication between the team is highly important.
- Try to provide your team with the required tools and techniques. Explain to them what the MVP is, and show them what software they will need to ideate, design and build the project.
- Rely on expert opinion. Sometimes it is hard to mentor when you do not have enough expertise. In these cases try to ask more experienced professionals to help.
Overall message
Me, and my co-mentor Aziza had full-time jobs, and tried to spend all of our free time and possible resources for the project development, and helping our team. Sometimes it was hard to find free time, find the time and place for the meeting which is suitable for all of us. However, the final result worth it all.
Here I want to highlight the importance of Technovation in development and support of women and girls in STEM in Kazakhstan. When we returned back home, a number of global mass media as Mashable, Teen Vogue and BBC wrote about us. As well as local media, who spread the information inside of the country. I hope this helped to build awareness of girls in the STEM field.
As a result, the number of girls interested in STEM field started to increase. Next year I had an opportunity to be the judge at the regional speech, and realized that the number of participating teams doubled, more regions get involved, and girls had more support from companies providing them access to coding courses and college scholarships.
This experience is priceless for me, in terms of career development and personal growth. Technovation helped me to broaden my network, become more self-aware in terms of career. Also, I met a bunch of professional people interested in contributing to the development of STEM. All of these is how Technovation changed my life.
So, if you have an interest to become a mentor visit the website of Technovation, and find more information about it.
I hope this article was helpful for you! If you have any questions, feel free to reach me through my profile.
All of this experience would be impossible without Aziza, my co-mentor who was fully dedicated to our goal and invested all possible resources to make our result happen 💜
Also, Aruzhan, Diyara, Azhar and Dianna who with sparking eyes, hardworking and eager to get more knowledge taught me more than I could teach them during this period of time .