Students create digital tools to solve problems

With competition season coming to a close at Apps for Good, we look back on successful events celebrating students ideas in both London and Gdynia. 

Award Winning teams showcase 2017’s pioneering ideas at the 2017 Apps for Good Awards: 

This year’s Apps for Good Award winners designed apps to help dementia sufferers and the elderly, teach sign language and make revision more efficient. 

The Apps for Good annual Awards ceremony (now in it’s 6th year) celebrates the young tech entrepreneurs who have completed the Apps for Good course. The event, at the end of the school calendar, is a culmination of all the ideas, learnings and hard work which students and teachers have put into the completion of the course throughout the year. The finalist teams are selected from the 25,000 students who have created the technology product which tackles the problem or issue they care about.

Schools from across the UK were in attendance at this year’s awards and it was a true celebration of the movement and impact student’s ideas are having on communities across the country. A previous example of an app helping to change a community is the Cattle Manager App which won at a past awards and has now been professionally developed and downloaded more than 25,000 times.

The quality of ideas brought to the finals means the stakes of the competition are always high and this year was no exception! The ideas which were finalists at the 2017 Awards maintained the outstanding quality we have become used to and the judges found it a tough challenge to select the winners.

Our partners (including Thomson Reuters, SAP, Samsung, Virgin Red and GoDaddy) and awards guests got to see the quality of all the students’ work in the marketplace where the students’ aim was to win votes in the prestigious People’s Choice Award. James, Managing Director, Virgin Red (sponsors of the People’s Choice Award) said the marketplace was “A unique insight into how the next generation view the world and are thinking about how to change it.”

For a more in depth look at this years winners take a look at our Awards 2017 blog. 

#AFGPoland: Chatbot and games ideas win our 2nd showcase in Gdynia - Apps for Good CEO Iris talks about her experience at the event:

On 18th May I travelled to the second Apps for Good Finals in Gdynia, Poland to see what our students in four local schools had created in the 2016/17 school year. Like last year I had the pleasure to attend with Bob, one of our longest and most passionate Apps for Good Experts and corporate partner (he’s Global Head of Design, Digital identity Solutions at Thomson Reuters) and his teenage son Jackson. In 2015 Bob inspired the Gdynia Women in Technology (a special thanks to Ewa Jaremczuk) within Thomson Reuters Poland and several of their male software developer colleagues to get involved and partner with local schools to bring Apps for Good to Poland. This year Wiktor, CEO at Netguru, our amazing platform development partner company joined the judging panel. Being passionate about helping to create a Polish start-up eco-system, Wiktor was keen to see emerging local tech talent on stage.

In total 17 teams of 14 to 17-year olds got on stage, presented and live demoed the prototypes they had created. In real Apps for Good tradition the problems addressed by these prototypes covered a wide range of areas: from how to do sports, how to cook healthy food, how to learn about diseases your dog might have, how to give first aid support as a kid or how to complete school application forms more effectively. Younger students presented on stage in Polish while most older students presented fluently in English.

Bob and I have done quite a lot of judging over the years with Apps for Good and at many other industry events. As the presentations commenced, our reaction is best summarized as jaw dropping.

While our cluster of schools in Poland is still small, this event really highlighted the high-quality work done by our teachers and students in Gdynia. With the winning teams working on chatbots and games it is also pointing us to some of the future technology platforms we should be looking at for future content frameworks.

We asked the winners of the People's Choice Award, Klaudia and Pawel, creators of Under the Eyelids, a game that tells the stories of young people in difficult situations, what impact they hoped their work could make. They responded:

“Our aim is to show that young people can make a difference. We would like to present a game that will change the way you see the world. The major objective for us is to create a game which will deliver a deeper meaning. For us, the authors of the game, the most important thing isn’t the game itself, but the idea “Under the Eyelids” promotes.”

I don’t think that there is a better way to summarise what we hope young people take away from Apps for Good: that they can make a difference and that technology is just a very powerful tool to help them achieve this bigger mission.

To read more about the individual winners, please take a look at Iris's extended blog on the showcase. 

As we move into late summer, the team at Apps for Good is working hard on preparing for the new academic and operational year in September. Look out for our next report to see what's new at Apps for Good, and all the exciting developments our team, students, teachers and experts will be embarking on in the coming months!