Meet the girls solving the world’s problems in CODEGIRL, a documentary released this week on YouTube, and available to view for free until this Thursday. The film follows teams of high school aged girls from Moldova to Brazil developing apps to address global needs – starting in their own backyard. The winning team TISI +% gets $10,000 to complete their app and launch it, but as the film unfolds we see that for many of the girls, the payoff comes well before the winners are announced. Filmmaker Lesley Chilcott, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” shadows the girls in the run-up to the Technovation Challenge. The international competition aims to encourage girls to enter the typically male-dominant field of coding.
The low number of women working in tech and the disparity between female founders who receive funding and men is nothing new. By 2017, the app market will be valued at $77 billion and Technovation estimates over 80% of developers are male. For the past six years, the girls-only challenge, sponsored and run by non-profit Iridescent, has awarded and empowered girls from around the globe to raise awareness of science, tech, engineering and math education. In other words, making tech accessible to girls.
In the 108-minute film we meet the girls aged 10-18, who get together with each other and a local mentor, before and after school for three months to create a winning app that solves a problem in their community.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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