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Technovation's high school girls and mentors in action.
Technovation Challenge is a joint program of Iridescent and Girls in Tech founded by Anuranjita Tewary to give Bay Area teen girls hands-on experience to learn about high tech entrepreneurship. The program fosters learning and leadership through competitions, mentoring, and projects dealing with technology innovation.
On December 11, 2009, Technovation kicked-off with an after-school event hosted by Apple attended by 50 girls from 9 local high-schools and 12 mentors from Apple, Virgin Airlines, and AdMob. The girls and mentors worked in teams to design and storyboard ideas for iPhone apps with an iPod donated by Apple to the team with the best app idea.
The successful launch taught the girls much more than technology. Students walked away with a renewed appreciation for engineering and math, insight into choosing career paths, and new definitions of success.
"I learned that engineering is an option for girls and that I wouldn't be alone," said one student. Another student learned that "hard work and passion can get you anywhere."
Ms. Tewary, the program's Executive Director, said that she had the inspiration for Technovation after attending Startup Weekend in San Francisco and reading Tina Seelig’s book, “What I Wish I Knew When I was 20.”
The conference and book motivated Ms. Tewary, a corporate professional who has worked for Intel, Microsoft and is now a Product Manager at AdMob, to tap into her own inner entrepreneur.
“I felt very empowered by my realization and I started thinking about ways to make a program for girls in high school that would give them that same feeling of empowerment.”
To organize Technovation, Ms. Tewary approached two local affiliations, Iridescent, a science education nonprofit for underserved 3rd to 7th graders, and Girls in Tech, a Silicon Valley organization for women working in technology.
Ms. Tewary and her colleagues found many mentors and corporations willing to nurture the future female leaders of high tech to break the “Silicon ceiling.” Techcrunch recently reported that only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms are founded by women in Silicon Valley. A 2008 study by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University looked at women who have spent between 10 and 20 years in high tech and found almost one-third of women at the "middle level" of their high-tech careers planning to quit primarily because of perceived barriers to advancement.
On February 23, 2010, Technovation began its 8-week spring after-school program hosted by Google. Mentors and students work together to learn App Inventor for Android, a new Google-based programming language. Each team creates a mobile app and writes a business plan culminating in a live presentation before venture capitalists at “Pitch Night.”
To learn more about this program and Technovation’s Summer Internship program, visit www.iridescentbayarea.org.
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