Shared with the permission of ihub Niagara.
BDSS will be participating in this exciting program for the first time this year. The team is only allowed to have five members. We have three so far, with one student in mind as the fourth. The fifth will be decided by doing a “gap analysis” of our needs after the girls research and understand the program requirements.
Currently, most computer scientists and entrepreneurs are men. Software fields are exploding and yet jobs go unfilled due to a shortage of programmers. In his keynote speech at the National Technovation Challenge event, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz shared a statistical fact; when you educate a girl in the developing world, on average, five people get educated because she will educate at least four other people through the course of her life. The same finding is not true for boys. By educating girls, Technovation transforms the culture of computer science and business to one of cooperation and equal opportunity.
Technovation Challenge provides a safe environment for girls and mentors to step out of their comfort zone and take computational, entrepreneurial, and leadership risks. Over the past three years over 800 high-school girls have programmed 125 mobile phone apps and learned how to launch their startups. 94% of these girls now believe that a career in technology is a viable option for them. Technovation uses project-based learning to encourage a whole suite of transferable skills in our students that go far beyond a traditional computer science curriculum. The curriculum has the direct, hands-on application of creating a personally relevant mobile app instead of taking a programming test in a classroom. The interdisciplinary focus on computer science and business teaches girls how to work as part of a team to create something original and relevant. Our model includes high doses of mentoring by women in the high-tech or computer science worlds.