By Maxim Baczynski | Business Development Executive
It’s the first day of spring and, here at Apps for Good, we’re not peering through the clouds to the non-event solar eclipse but looking ahead to the Apps for Good Awards taking place at the Barbican on Thursday, 18th June 2015.
Whilst we’re beavering away on the finer details of the event, our students are busy putting the finishing touches to their pioneering app ideas. Submissions are now open to our cohort of over 25,000 students from all over the UK and they will be busy completing feasibility studies, developing marketing strategies, and hammering out business plans.
After submissions close on 24th April, we will start the hard work of shortlisting down the entries (last year we received nearly 600!) to just 18 finalist teams. Those teams will be invited down to London to visit local tech enterprises around Tech City UK and then pitch their problem-solving app ideas to our fearsome panels of industry Dragons. The 7 best teams will win the opportunity to work with professional agencies to develop their prototypes into fully-fledged apps for release onto the open market in early 2016.
In other news, Apps for Good is very excited to be going international! This year we are running a number of pilot projects in Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, and Romania. We are working with 3 regional governments in Spain to deliver our course in around 70 schools and working with over 20 schools in Portugal. We will be following the usual Apps for Good protocol of iterative development - assessing our impact, looking at what works, what doesn’t, and how we can innovate to improve. We are very excited about all the lessons to be learnt from moving the course into an international context!
Apps for Good is proud to be a partner of BBC’s Make It Digital – a major UK-wide initiative to inspire a new generation to get creative with digital technology. Launched on 12 March 2015, a season of Make it Digital TV, radio and online content seeks to place a spotlight on digital skills like never before through an ambitious range of new programmes, partnerships and projects. Find out more about the partnership on the Apps for Good Blog.
The Apps for Good Fellows’ Community is up and running. It is open to any student who has taken the course and is a great way for students to learn further skills and access opportunities to gain experience in the tech world. Leanne recently visited our offices when she was down in London to do some work experience at one of our incredible Strategic Partners, Thomson Reuters. Leanne, a student currently taking the Apps for Good course at one of our super-engaged Ninja Schools, Wick High School, is already taking advantage of the type of opportunities available to Fellows. You can find out more about the Fellows Programme here.
To finish, the App Launch was a great success! All the winning apps are now available - you can download them here!
We look forward to receiving all this year's app entry submissions by April 24th. Bring on the shortlisting!
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