Spotlight — Apps for Good continues to empower UK school pupils with invaluable tech skills
Last week Computer Weekly opened voting for the most influential women in UK technology and we were delighted to see Apps for Good UK Managing Director Heather Picov, one of our members, make the 2017 list.
We wanted to find out a bit more about Heather and the work of the charity, so we popped into Techspace Bath Street, a short walk from Old Street roundabout in the heart of London’s technology scene.
Apps for Good offers educators the chance to empower their students with the skills and knowledge to build their own digital products, by delivering their creative learning courses and offering ongoing mentoring.
Since their launch, the charity has reached over 100,000 students in 1500 schools across the UK and globally. It’s been a busy few weeks; the charity has just wrapped up its annual awards ceremony, and rounded off the school term with an announcement of fresh Lottery funding.
How does Apps for Good work?
We offer our programmes to non fee paying schools across the UK who want to empower their students with these skills. They can sign up through the website, and we provide teachers with a flexible course framework. They get access to our bespoke dashboards, so their teachers can deliver the course with plenty of support and materials from us.
We also connect them to our network of volunteers, or experts, who work with the students through the course. The students can get valuable feedback on their app ideas and check with experts to see if they approve of their business models.
What kind of things do your students create?
We get all ages of students from 8 year olds to 18 year olds on the programme. We ask them to pick a problem they care about — and it can be any problem that matters to them, as long as it’s not purely about profit or a game.
There’s a key rule in Apps for Good: the product idea must be driven by the students themselves — it can’t come from us, the teachers or our sponsors. Because of that, we get a huge range of innovative ideas from our students.
We’ve had students create apps around doing homework, social issues, and what’s happening in their lives and families lives. We had a group of students create an app designed to manage cattle on a farm — as their family were in farming.
The students go through the exact process a real product developer would go through, from building wireframes to understanding the technical feasibility to creating a business models. Last year we launched a new Internet of Things course and one of the products created was Safe Step, an alert system for tracking loved ones in the home incase they fall. It was the winner of our IoT category at our annual awards.
How are you funded?
We’ve just received £1.2 million funding from the National Lottery, which will allow us to continue to scale our reach across the UK. Also we’re supported by a number of other trusts and foundations, such as Comic Relief. We’re also partner with corporations who share our mission of transforming technology education, who’ve included Facebook,Google,, Thomson Reuters, SAP and Salesforce.
What’s happening at Apps for Good at the moment?
Calendar-wise, we’re getting ready for the new school year ahead. We’re doing more regional events and hope to grow the model of the awards. We just had our first regional events in Scotland! We not only want to help young people build bridges globally, but also to reach out to people closer to home, with local role models in the community.
Your awards night just happened — can you tell us more about it?
Sure! All of the schools on the programme can enter The Apps for Good Awards 2017, our annual competition to find the very best innovative ideas that come out of the course.
We shortlist and pick the top ideas, then bring students down to London to pitch to our judges. This includes very senior people at some exciting companies including the Heads of Innovation at Spotify and Thomson Reuters, and CEO of Barclaycard. Our students pair with startups in the morning, then pitch ideas to the judges in the afternoon. We’ve got 1,300 experts signed up to our programme, from companies startups and agencies like Moving Brands and Moo to large corporations like EE.
It’s great for the students to come to London and experience a real tech office. Many of them have never been inside an office and experienced startup life — like burritos for lunch!
What’s in the roadmap for the future?
One thing is still continuing to reach schools and help young people within the UK. We’re growing our Fellowship programme, which supports students once they have finished the course, to learn more about careers in technology and further their entrepreneurial skills.
We’re also continuing to build content for emerging technologies, such as machine learning. We want to keep pace with the rapidly moving technology sector, while ensuring that we produce really good quality content — making sure it works for teachers in the classroom.
What have been your biggest learnings?
The importance of the team. We are a team of 12 at the moment — we have some remote workers in the South West, and our CEO is in Germany. Our team all work really hard and we rely so much on our team, it’s hugely important to invest in them.
Also the importance of speaking to your users and challenging your assumptions. We have bespoke software that we build that gives teachers access to the content, support materials, as well as connections to our volunteers. We’ve learned a lot about building our software and the importance of speaking to our users, and we’ve gotten a lot of things wrong. We even had to shut down the first version of our software entirely, as it just didn’t work and there was no way to save it.
What advice would you give your younger self?
To not be afraid to ask for help. I have some great mentors, who’ve really helped support me. Don’t underestimate the value of networks.
Vote for Heather in the 2017 Computer Weekly most influential women in UK technology awards here.
