My experience as a mentor for the Technovation Challenge
Fight for diversity, lead the change!
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Recently, the New York Times dedicated an extensive article to the stories of women behind the development of computer programming. The article was meant to raise the question of what went wrong so that there were more female programmers in the past than there are nowadays, particularly given the high impact of technology in our daily life.
Indeed, the study Women in the Digital Age, carried out by the European Commission, shows not only that the number of men in the digital world is 3 times higher than the number of women, but also that there has been a decrease in the female presence in studies related to Science, Engineering and Technology. Here in Spain, the numbers are not much more promising: only 13% of programmers are women. There are reasons to believe that the jobs in the near future will be strongly related to the digital sphere, so, what does that mean for women, if nothing is done to try to fix their invisibility in the sector?
That is when I heard about Technovation, an initiative that aims to provide girls aged from 10 to 18 with the necessary skills they need to solve a problem in their chosen community by building a mobile app. I did not hesitate to join their team, and for the past 13 weeks I have been a mentor for the latest Technovation Challenge.
The girls I have been collaborating with, Adriana and Lena, aged 11, decided to approach the phenomenon of school bullying that they observed in their classrooms and when talking to their friends. As a result, they have started building an app that allows students to anonymously report situations in which they feel someone is, or they themselves are, being bullied. But also Gnome, as they named their app, provides the teachers with useful data to properly identify and help prevent further cases of bullying.
The struggles with coding have been real for Adriana and Lena, who had no previous knowledge of programming. Of course, they were really surprised how ‘unfriendly’ an app can be behind the surface, and found the logic of the instructions they needed to write quite hard to translate into their ambitious plan. I could not help laughing at how exasperated the girls felt after some time invested in trying different solutions for a problem they had — without any success, I have to admit, as often happens. “15 minutes of our lives lost!”, they said with disappointment. Can you imagine? 15 minutes LOL.
The challenge, however, has not only been technical. Trying to help them deal better with frustration and losing the fear of making mistakes has probably been, due to the habits they acquire at school, one of the hardest, but most rewarding experiences. At the end, not surprisingly, given what I have seen these girls do, the change of their mentality when approaching a technical difficulty has been clear. Before our last day together, when they were preparing to submit their project, Lena sent me an email to tell me “Adriana and me have been talking, and we now have a clear idea of what is working and what isn’t, so we have been doing our research and trying multiple solutions to try to make it to the final”. The last day I saw them, they were even able to enjoy not only the design, but also the coding required for what they wanted to achieve!
In the end, Technovation has been a great learning opportunity, not only for Lena and Adriana, but also for myself because by working with them I have been able to get to know better about some of the problems that young people face daily, what their fears and aspirations are, and the creativity and curiosity with which they put themselves in the world. The experience and knowledge of Paula, the other mentor of the team, has also been of incredible value, since she was an expert on getting a general view of what the process of developing a technical project is. However, if I must choose, I want to emphasize how two girls with no knowledge ended up owning their own project, embracing the potential that they have to make an impact in their community through technology.
The 18th of May they will be presenting Gnome to an audience at Carlos III University, and I cannot wait to know what awaits in the near future for them…and you, what are you waiting for?
