Education United Kingdom Project #7081

Students create digital tools to solve problems

by Apps for Good

Students create digital tools to solve problems

Project Report | May 27, 2016
Building up to the 2016 Apps for Good Awards -

By Fergus Knight | Business Development Executive

The WeKonnect team present at Wembley Arena!

In the three months following the launch of last years winning apps, Apps for Good students, staff, Education Community, Expert Community and Fellowship Community have been working hard building up to next months big event: The 2016 Apps for Good Awards.

During March, students across the country were finalising their app ideas ready for submission in April, whilst our previous winners and Fellows have been developing their ideas further and spreading the word about their award winning creations, most notably the WeKonnect team who won the People's Choice Award powered by Essence in 2015. The winning students from Denbigh High School in Luton presented to a massive audience at this years We Day celebrations at Wembley Arena on the 9th of March. WeKonnect is an App to help build a support network for young carers to share their experiences and provide easier access to information around a challenging issue that many children across the country have to muster the courage to deal with every day. We are very proud of what the WeKonnect team has achieved, going from strength to strength since their app debuted at our App Launch this February.

Equally as impressive, 2015 Apps for Good Award Winners Ben and Rebecca who created "My World of Atoms", a mobile game that is an accessible platform for children to learn chemistry, picked up Gold in the Mobile App category at the Essex Digital awards. Ben and Rebecca have been working hard on taking their app a step further, releasing My World of Atoms on the Apple App store this April after securing funding for it's development.

It's been a busy time for Apps for Good in the past weeks and the next few are going to be even busier! Throughout April we worked in conjunction with our Expert community and our corporate partners to shortlist a very strong body of entries down to 15 finalists for categories sponsored by Samsung, Thomson Reuters, Salesforce, The London Legacy Development Corporation and SAP. We have some excellent apps this year which will make for a great event. All of this years finalists are listed on our website.

As well as some very creative app ideas with topics such as healthy eating, access to culture for disabled people and helping young people cope with loss, we are also honouring six influential members of our Fellowship Community who have been tireless in their efforts to expand their ideas and aspirations, inspire and mentor students on the course and engage with industry. Have a look at this blog for more information on each of these rising stars.

Your continued support has been influential in allowing all of this to happen and will be a strong contributor in making this years Apps for Good Awards the best yet! We are very excited for the event, and whilst the coming weeks will mean hard work for all involved, the result is always a fantastic day where all of the communities that make Apps for Good great come together to acknowledge the ingenuity of some inspiring students with some excellent ideas.

The stage is soon to be set for another celebration of the next generation of technologists, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs.

My World of Atoms

Ben and Rebecca win a Gold EDA award.

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Mar 1, 2016
#AFG5Years & Our 2016 App Launch

By Fergus Knight | Business Development Executive

Alejandro demonstrates BOOKd to Fellow Jashvanth

As we move closer to spring, Apps for Good looks set for another successful year powering a new generation to change their world with technology.

Whilst our hugely enthusiastic students are still knocking it out of the park with some really impressive Apps, one particularly special thing about 2016 is that it's our five year anniversary!

We began delivering our programme to only 34 students in two centres in London in 2010/11. Over the past five years we have grown within the UK and internationally and are now delivering in over 850 schools worldwide and have positively impacted over 50,000 young people! This rapid growth has enabled us to inspire students to use technology creatively and open their eyes to the wealth of opportunity tech and entrepreneurial skills can bring. This has been our core focus for the past five years, and will continue to be for the next.

Besides continuing to deliver the Apps for Good programme, we also have big plans for the future; we want to continue developing into a truly global movement, introducing students to problem solving with technology all over the world. Some of our goals for the next five years include:

Increasing the number of centres delivering the Apps for Good course to 2,200 by 2020 - we want to maintain and grow our reach in schools within the UK and expand the number of institutions working with us internationally.

Giving former Apps for Good students the opportunity to continue to develop their problem-solving technology products and help expand the Apps for Good movement by strengthening and growing our Fellowship programme.

Growing our reach over the last five years has been a great achievement, but it could never have happened without the dedication of our teachers, experts and funding partners. We want to celebrate those relationships and the achievements of our students this year by running a fifth anniversary social media campaign using the hashtag #AFG5years. The campaign began alongside our 2016 App Launch on February 4th and saw over 1,500 related Tweets and millions of potential impressions across social media on the night, further drawing attention to the wonderful digital creations the winning student teams were presenting at the launch and the wider Apps for Good movement.

The event itself was a great success. It took place in an excellent location at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that brought together a truly diverse room of students, fellows, teachers, parents, experts and corporate partners all sharing ideas and praise for the fully developed products the students have created.

It was an evening of forward thinking with a focus on progress in technology education, spearheaded by speeches from Apps for Good Chairman Charlie Leadbeater, Founder and co-CEO Iris Lapinski, Chair of the London Legacy Development Corporation David Edmonds and last, but by no means least, Apps for Good Trustee and Fellow Mohima Ahmed.

Representatives from our Fellowship Community were no small help in making the evening a success; several former Apps for Good students attended the event to talk to our guests and raise awareness about how participants of the course can continue to develop their new found interest in technology after completing the initial Apps for Good journey.

We have so many people to thank that have helped us to get this far and deliver the impact that we have, but we would like to extend a special thank you to all those who have donated through Global Giving and particularly the money raised by the people at Nokia and VMware. Without vital fundraising like this we may have never made it to five years delivering Apps for Good, and events like our App Launch may never have been able to go ahead.

Your continued support is so valuable both to us as an organisation and the students that receive the Apps for Good programme. Make sure to tweet with the #AFG5years hashtag, and stay tuned for our annual awards this June 20th!

The My World of Atoms Team present their App.

Apps for Good Fellows Josie and Habibah

John from One Click Politics discusses his App

David Edmonds, Chairman, London Legacy DC

Apps for Good Fellow & Trustee - Mohima Ahmed

Hasan from weKonnekt discusses the app.

Clodagh & Isaac from GardenKing present their App.

The Assemble Jobs team present their app.

The MySoundClash team prepare for the event.

Links:

Steven Brown talks about our 2016 App Launch & #AFG5years

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Dec 4, 2015
Women in Tech - Inspire the next generation!

By Noreen Aldworth | Communications & Events Manager

On Ada Lovelace Apps for Good, Capgemini and Tech Partnership are teamed up to launch the TechFuture Women’s Network. In this report, Apps for Good’s co-CEO Debbie Forster explains how the Network seeks to tackle the gender imbalance in the technology industry.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and for us it’s the perfect time to look towards the next generation of women in STEM. We are proud to team up with Capgemini and the Tech Partnership to launch the TechFuture Women’s Network, an initiative which will use the energy of female role models to alter perceptions of the industry, and help to build a more diverse and tech savvy workforce.

We’re asking women working in the digital and technology sector to join the TechFuture Women’s Network, a community of professionals taking part in programmes that promote technology in schools.

We’re delighted that the first opportunity available to members of the TechFuture Women’s Network is to join our Apps for Good Expert Community. Members of our Expert Community share their skills and knowledge with our student teams as they develop ideas for apps – getting loads of energy, inspiration and new perspectives in return.

Industry role models can be an important part of careers advice and this is especially true for technology. The technology sector is complex and constantly in flux, so it can be difficult to get beyond job titles. Having someone visit the classroom or connect online and speak about their day-to-day job or how their company works can widen students’ perspectives. This is especially important for your female students. Although uptake of computing A-levels by girls has increased this year by around 45 per cent, they lag far behind boys, making up just 8% of this year’s A-levels (that’s only 456 girls or 0.1 per cent of the entire A-level cohort). Part of the problem is that girls still see computing as ‘geeky’ and ‘male’, but you can help counter these stereotypes by establishing female role models for both your male and female students. This will contribute towards a new “norm” in the eyes of both genders and help the girls who then make these choices feel more accepted. We hope that the increasing number of women who join our Expert Community via the TechFuture Women’s Network will help us establish this new norm.

Over the next few months the Network will grow to include more opportunities for TechFuture Women to mentor and inspire young people by showing them the range of opportunities within the technology sector. By joining the Network here you will automatically become an Apps for Good Expert as well as receive updates and invitations to future initiatives. We look forward to working with you to inspire the next generation of women in tech!

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