UC3M closesTechnovation Girls 2020
International entrepreneurship and technology programme for girls
10/22/20
The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) will hold an online event on Friday 23rd October at 6pm to highlight the teams from Madrid who participated in Technovation Girls 2020, the world’s largest entrepreneurship and technology programme for girls, in which 115 teams, 188 mentors and 455 girls participated. This initiative offers girls the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to enable them to become technological entrepreneurs.
Photograph of the finalist team mentored by UC3M students, Della Nostra Purity@uc3m, who proposed the development of the Appility application, an app that helps people with disabilities.
Technovation Girls is an international project which aims to bring science and innovation closer to girls aged between 10 and 18. This programme is organised by Iridescent, a global non-profit engineering and technology organisation, and is one of the biggest technology entrepreneurship competitions for girls. It aims to promote innovation and creativity, as well as reduce the gender gap in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers.
Each year, groups of up to 5 girls take on the challenge of developing a business plan and a mobile application that solves a problem in their community and that responds to a social need related to education, equality, environment, health, peace, or poverty. This year, despite complications, the young women and their mentors managed to get their projects off the ground. This forum organised by the UC3M is designed to give teams the opportunity to present their projects and receive live questions and feedback from the virtual audience about the applications and their development.
The UC3M’s Vice-President for Students and Equality,Mónica Campos, will host the welcome ceremony. This will be followed by an informative talk by the evolutionary and molecular biologist, Elena Gómez-Díaz, from The Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine "López-Neyra” of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, in its Spanish acronym) in Granada, and then the six finalist teams in the junior and senior categories will present their projects for the Technovation Girls Madrid 2020 competition, where they will answer questions from the audience. Finally, Power to Code, Technovation Girls regional ambassadors, will give a speech.
The UC3M is incorporating this activity into its STEM4GirlsUC3M programme to promote technological and scientific vocations, aimed at girls and young women in secondary and higher education. This programme has taken place throughout 2019/20 with a series of different technological workshops, the mentor programme, the exchange of experiences between female researchers and students, and a performing arts project. This event is also supported by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT, in its Spanish acronym) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Spanish Institute of Women and Equal Opportunities.
You can follow the day’s activities via the UC3M’s YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/gaFb-dgj6LA
Register for this event via the Technovation Girls 2020 Event website
