Students create digital tools to solve problems

-  On February 16^th at the Communities & Local Government, we hosted our second Dragons' Den, a stimulating event in the style of the BBC’s “Dragons’ Den”. Teams of Apps for Good students presented their final app ideas to a Dragons' Den panel who decided which apps would receive further support and be built.  

Since early September, 20 students (aged 13 - 17) from the Central Foundation Girls School in East London have been working in teams to research and reflect on issues that affect their lives and their communities and creating mobile apps to solve them.  In November 2010, we saw five teams present their initial ideas at Talk Talk in Soho for the first time. They have since worked hard to evolve and refine their ideas based on the feedback they received. 

Our panel of dragons included:

• Anthony Lilley  - Chief Creative Officer and CEO of Magic Lantern. He is a BAFTA and Peabody Award winning interactive media producer who has worked on projects such as Top Gear, Doctor Who, Teletubbies, Spooks, FourDocs, The Guardian and many others. 
• Desigan Chinniah - Firestarter, Innovator & Geek at Mozilla Labs. He has over 7 years of experience with leading web entities, such as Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Skype, BBC World Service, eBay, Gumtree.com and PayPal.
• Ian Cleland Ritchie - Chairman of iomart plc., Computer Application Services Ltd., the Interactive Design Institute, and Caspian Learning Ltd. Ritchie was awarded an CBE in the 2003 for services to enterprise and education. He is also a board member of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and of the Nominet Trust.
• Jogesh Limbani - Head of Open Innovation at Orange Labs, the Orange International R&D laboratory, recognised within the France Telecom Group for its excellence in Symbian Software Development, Design & Usability and Unified Communications towards the Integrated Operator model.
• Lopa Patel - Founder of redhotcurry.com, the UK's leading South Asian lifestyle website that generates over 3 million hits and in excess of 40,000 unique visitors per month.

Buzzer-Buddiez, a social wake-up app that helps people to remember why they should wake up in the morning and send messages to friends and families and Transit, an app to help teachers to communicate with parents who speak Bengali only, have convinced the Dragons and will work closely with developers to have their app built.

For the final presentations of the winning apps:

Buzzer-Boddiez: http://www.slideshare.net/CDIEurope/buzzer-buddiez-final-presentation

Transit: http://www.slideshare.net/CDIEurope/transit-final-presentation