Standing out in a pool of more than 500 applicants, two Spence students made the cut for a nationwide coding competition run by Built By Girls, which encourages young women to be leaders in technology. Citizen AOL and #BUILTBYGIRLS sponsored the contest for tech projects built by girls, judged by girls.

 

Aruna P., a senior, and Catherine B., a junior, traveled to San Francisco on Thursday, September 8, 2016, to attend the competition, which involved presenting an 8- to 10-minute pitch to about 200 people, including venture capitalists and developers, at Twitter’s headquarters.

 

The Built By Girls competition has two tracks. Future Founders is what Catherine competed in against four other teams. (Read more about the finalists whose products were deemed most likely to succeed in the business world here.) The other track, Let Girls Build, is linked to Michelle Obama’s Let Girls Learn campaign, which is what Aruna competed in against two other finalists. (Read more about those three finalists’ projects here.)

 

Aruna, who admitted that she felt some nerves going into the competition, ultimately came away with a finalist prize. She attended the hackathon after pitching her project and found out that her project earned her tickets to TechCrunch, one of the biggest technology conferences in the world.

 

Catherine said the pitch experience “went really well and was super fun.” She also attended the hackathon and networked with people at the conference who were interested in her project and in forging relationships.

 

Catherine said that while she’s comfortable speaking to large audiences because of her acting experience, the new environment and new city added a different type of pressure. In preparation, Catherine and her partner, who attends another school, had reviewed their pitch and presented it to friends, family and members of the community involved in technology to make sure they had an effective presentation.

 

“For me, the reason I started coding was because I felt like it was a language that everyone should learn, and it’d be pretty crazy to go into my adult life not knowing it,” she said.

 

Catherine, who started coding about two years ago, has participated in two Flatiron School programs, one of which was specifically geared toward creating iPhone apps. At the Built By Girls competition, she pitched her app called Whistle, which allows witnesses and victims of sexual assault to notify nearby users of their location for help. She credited her math teachers, Mr. Eric Zahler and Dr. Justin Iwerks, with encouraging her to pursue coding.

 

Catherine’s app used Twilio, a cloud communications platform, and the Twilio team met Catherine and her partner at the conference and gave them free credits to use on the platform. 

 

Aruna’s interest in coding was sparked in a Grade 7 computer class where students learned about projects around the world and how they can make an impact. Aruna, who essentially began teaching herself how to code, recalls that her teacher brought up coding as an area to explore, saying, “If you’re interested, you can learn how to code and make a difference.” “I thought that was cool,” Aruna said.

 

Aruna’s Built By Girls pitch focused an initiative called Nerdina (a female nerd), which started at Spence in 2014 and has since expanded to other schools. Nerdina aims to provide educational content and tools for girls to become young tech professionals, and the kits are delivered to students’ homes or schools. Aruna observed that there were coding programs available for young women to try, but few provided all the resources for students to make their own circuits, products and devices.

 

As Aruna starts the college application process this fall, she will be thinking about programs that combine computer science and engineering, but she said she is also interested in learning more about business and finance. Catherine would like to pursue art science and said she thought not knowing how to code would be a disadvantage in the field.

 

“I think it’s crazy that more than half the apps on my phone were made by men, and I’m a girl,” Catherine said. “Men—great as they are—don’t know everything about women and our needs and what we want to see in technology.”