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City schoolgirls code for a bolder tomorrow.
Launched in USA in 2013 at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, Women Enhancing Technology (WeTech) and was launched to train women and girls in developing the skills to participate in technological and economic growth. The school girls and university women programme was subsequently launch
Bengaluru or the Silicon Valley of India is bursting at its seams today with start-ups and other IT related projects and commercial ventures. A lesser known fact is that it is also dripping with social initiatives driven by Information Technology (IT).
Here is a project which introduces schoolgirls to the nuances of coding and helps them develop apps. Meet 33-year-old Dhana Lakshmi Kodithi, senior lead engineer at a Bengaluru IT firm, who heads a team of 12 mentors who in turn teach 25 schoolgirls how to code and build apps under Women Empowering Technology (WeTech).
“Not many women opt for coding after finishing their engineering. This is primarily because of lack of familiarity with coding early on in life. We need to expose our girls to a varied curriculum that also involves coding and let them pick what they like,” says Kodithi.
“In my school there is cyber association, but it basically an all boys thing. They just have one girl in the team. So, when I got an opportunity and a platform to build an app, I took it and eventually fell in love with coding,” says 13-year-old Aditi Neti.
This initiative can also be viewed as a measure to remedy the findings of a survey conducted in 2013; the software industry had only 11.2% software developers.
Under the able mentorship of Kodithi and Senthil Kumar, Khyathi Rachakonda, Rachel Ranjan, Adi Krishna Ne, Diya Sinha and Diya Anup — a team of eighth grade students from National Public School, Indiranagar who have built an app — Elixir. The application is positioned as a platform that encourages interactions anonymously between cancer patients and survivors. Diya Anup, one of the developers says that support groups for diseases and other problems still remain a taboo in India. Hopefully, this app will kickstart the culture of support groups.
This campaign was launched in the United States of America in 2013 at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting. The campaign is called Women Enhancing Technology (WeTech) and was launched to train women and girls in developing the skills to participate in technological and economic growth. The school girls and university women programme was subsequently launched in Bengaluru in 2014 by the Institute of International Education (IIE).
The program encourages schoolgirls to develop an innovative app that solves a community problem under the weekly mentorship of a senior head resource from leading IT firms.
“In the past 3 years, the programme has supported more than 300 school girls and a similar number of women have volunteered to be mentors for these girls. These girls hail from a mix of public/government and private schools. The programme is supported by corporate funding and the classes are free for girls,” says Megha Bhagat, Consulting India Programme Manager, WeTech.
Generally the girls are from grade VIII to XII and from diverse schools from the city. Last year the programme included girls from disadvantaged communities and BBMP schools.
WeTech’s profile doesn’t include only mentoring in mobile app coding. Throughout the year the programme also organises exposure visits for these schoolgirls to tech companies, meetings with incubators and an introduction to the startup eco system partners.
At the end of three months when the mobile app is ready, WeTech organises a pitch event where the girls can pitch their apps to a panel of judges.
This year, the panel of judges included 3 women entrepreneurs, Sarita Mishra, founder of Green Cosmos, Anu Sridharan, co-Founder & CEO of NextDrop and Monika Shukla, Co-founder of Lets Endorse.
The winning app of this season was CarbonSins – developed by schoolgirls of Army Public School, K Kamraj Road.
The winning team — Sachi Sathaye, Noynika Shukla, Arshya Loomba, Tanisha Khera and Anarghya Rao — was mentored by Girish Bommakant, Abhishek Roy and Vaishnavi Vaithiyalingam Kalaichelvan from another leading IT firm in the city.
The app is developed to generate awareness in people about their contribution in polluting the earth by sharing their individual carbon footprint. The application also is designed to guide the users in ways to reduce one’s carbon footprint and allocates reward points to the lowest generators among the premium members.
* Read the original story by Swathi Nair on www.newindianexpress.com