I am fortunate enough to have been able to participate in the TechGirls competition in 2017. I along with a group of friends created an app called the Healthy Emoji which encourages a healthy lifestyle from a young age. My team won state champions & we all will still consider it as an achievement in later years to come.

Tech girls gave us the chance to use many skills including creativity, resilience & innovation.

Creativity: We designed an app which encouraged healthy living from a young age, it was encouraged with rewards such as accessories for your avatar/emoji. I was involved in designing the app & we had many ideas before we had our final idea.

Resilience: We ran into many problems along the way, technical & emotional. We had to overcome these problems as a team. At times we just wanted to give up as we thought it was too hard or too much to cope with. We had to lift each other up when we felt discouraged.

Problem-solving: As a team, we had many ideas that all had great potential. We had to pick the idea which best represented our team & our values. Our main goal was to help others & that was what inspired & motivated us to spend those months improving our curating and improving our app. There were many problems along the way, from the coding to the design. We managed to overcome our problems with flying colours, resulting in us being featured front page in the newspaper and winning a trip to a robotics convention!

I learnt a lot in the TechGirls competition & I’m sure that my team would agree, that it is a competition which really puts us in charge of our learning & motivates young girls to strive for excellence.