Mobile App Makeathon

Project Setup:

• Review the 2017 Technovation Challenge Themes with the girls and how they might relate to your community.
  • Poverty. Examples include eradicating extreme poverty (measured as living under $1.25 a day), implementing social protection systems for all, and ensuring that all men and women have equal access to economic resources.
  • Environment. Examples include improving education and awareness about climate change and strengthening resilience to climate-change hazards in all countries. If you look at the other two related categories: Life Below Water and Life On Land, you will find more ideas.
  • Peace. Examples include significantly reducing violence, ending abuse of children, reducing corruption and bribery, ensuring equal access to justice for all, and ensuring public access to information.
  • Equality. Examples include ending all forms of discrimination against girls and women everywhere, eliminating all harmful practices such as early and forced marriage, enhancing the use of enabling technology to promote the empowerment of women, ensuring universal access to reproductive rights, and ensuring women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership.
  • Education. Examples include ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning experiences for all.
  • Health. Examples include ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all ages, maternal and child health, universal health coverage, and access for all to safe, effective, quality and affordable medicines and vaccines.
• Note: Depending on the age of your group you may want to focus on one theme or let girls pitch ideas from any of the themes.

Decide on a Problem

• Do the Our Community A-Z activity (described below) to spark discussion about what your community needs are.
  • This activity will help your girls visualize their community by brainstorming words that describe it. Have each girl write out the letters of the alphabet in their design journal, then write one word that describes the community for as many letters of the alphabet as possible, as fast as she can. For example, "R=Rural". Don't overthink this—it should be spontaneous!
    • For younger girls you can create a list as a whole group with girls calling out words as they come to each letter.
  • As a large group, share some of the brainstormed words and discuss them. Are there any commonalities? Any surprises? How might some of these tie to the Technovation Themes?
• Now that the girls have gathered a list of words describing their community, Have everyone think about the community needs and write down the problems they are interested in solving on a post-it. No idea is right or wrong.
• Put one idea on each post-it, include two sentences. Write one about why the problem is important. Write the second one about whom the problem affects and how.
• Spread out everyone's post its and look at them as a group.
• Discuss: Are there any patterns? Is there any overlap in interest? Are the problems so wide in scope that they will not be easily addressed by an app? If so, can they be broken down into smaller problems?
• Remind the girls that the problem will need to be addressed by a mobile app and they should make use of the features that mobile technology has to offer.
• Now it's time for the Pitch session.