All-girl teams shine at global tech contest with health care apps
Team members share their take on girl power and gender inequality in the tech industry
Hong Kong schoolgirls have triumphed at the Technovation World Pitch Summit this summer, the world’s biggest international technology entrepreneurship challenge for girls aged 10 to 18.
A team of five pupils in their early teens from Diocesan Girls’ School (DGS) won the Grand Prize (Junior Division) for making an innovative mobile app that helps dementia patients and caregivers. They beat no fewer than 1,100 other junior teams worldwide to the accolade.
The DGS team was present at the five-day summit held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in Silicon Valley in September. Hong Kong’s top senior team, from St Paul’s Convent School, which was selected as a world semi-finalist, joined them as a visiting team.
Young Makers & ChangeMakers, a non-profit platform promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills among youth in Hong Kong, was pivotal in introducing the worldwide event to the territory.
It has reached out to nearly 300 girls from more than 40 schools across Hong Kong who participated under the guidance of more than 100 industry and teacher mentors, utilising Technovation’s online curriculum to ideate, prototype, create and pitch their app solution using MIT’s App Inventor visual programming language. A total of 22 teams were set up, each developing its own app.
Participating pupils were also given the opportunity to make field trips to cutting-edge workplaces such as Google Hong Kong, the Commonwealth Bank Innovation Lab, Infiniti Lab and WeWork, as well as attending a boot camp at the University of Hong Kong.
