Iridescent Announces Technovation Challenge National Pitch Night

Saturday, May 21st (Mountain View, CA)

At Iridescent's Technovation Challenge National Pitch Night, teams of entrepreneurial high school girls will compete to have their mobile apps professionally developed and distributed on the Android Market.

Over the past two weeks, girls participating in the Technovation Challenge presented their business plans to a panel of high-profile judges at regional “pitch nights” across the country.  These students worked in teams to design mobile phone apps using Google’s App Inventor for Android, as part of a mentoring program hosted by Google and other tech companies this spring.

This Saturday at Google, six winning teams from the regional pitch nights will come to the bay area for a national pitch night, where they will compete to have their app professionally developed and distributed.  The event will happen from 6-9 pm at Google campus in Mountain View (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Building 40).  Members of the media are encouraged to attend.

The panel of judges for the national pitch night will include James Cham (Principal, Trinity Ventures), Christine Tsai (Principal, 500startups), Yujin Chung (Partner, Business Development, Andreessen Horowitz) , and Neeraj Choubey (General Manager for Tablets, DELL).  The winning team members will take home an Android phone, donated by Google, and every participant in the national pitch night will take home a Streak Android tablet, donated by DELL.

Background

The Technovation Challenge is a program of Iridescent, a Los-Angeles based 501(c)(3) non-profit which provides STEM education for underserved and underrepresented youth.

The goal of the course is to build students’ computer science skills, while teaching them how to think like entrepreneurs and create an innovative product.  Each team of five girls is supported by two female mentors: one high-tech professional and one undergraduate computer science student.  They work together to design a unique app using the user-centered design thinking process (developed by the Stanford Design School) write business plans, and build a convincing “pitch” which they present to the panel of judges.

The Technovation Challenge program was founded in 2009 by Dr. Anuranjita Tewary, who wanted to offer young women the experience of participating in a “start-up company” and understand what it takes to be a high-tech entrepreneur.  The pilot program was run in the spring of 2010, with 45 girls and 25 mentors from all over Silicon Valley.  The Technovation Challenge has now expanded to New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mountain View and Berkeley, CA reaching 230 high-school girls and 106 women mentors.

Event Details: http://bit.ly/tcpitchnight

Members of the media are welcome to attend!

Please RSVP:
AnnaLise Hoopes
Executive Director
annalise@iridescentlearning.org
(715) 771-9871

To learn more, visit:  www.technovationchallenge.org
 

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