Celebrating the girls of the 2023 Technovation Girls Challenge

The 2023 season of the Technovation Girls Challenge, a global entrepreneurial coding competition for girls aged 8-18, has been a resounding success! Every year, girls all over the world form teams and work together to identify a problem in their community and develop a mobile app or AI solution to address that problem. The teams also do market research and create a business plan to drive adoption of their solution. In 2023 teams from more than 60+ countries submitted over 2100 projects.

Locally, the Massachusetts chapter of Technovation Girls, led by the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s (MassTLC) Education Foundation, saw 23 teams participate. Of those, 18 senior division teams and five junior division teams submitted completed projects ranging from an app to help children with speech difficulties to one that helps users create healthy meals.

All the teams were invited to participate in the Technovation Girls Massachusetts Showcase that took place on May 13^th at Microsoft in Burlington, MA. Eight of the senior teams and three junior teams participated in this live event that featured a poster board session and a live pitch in front of all the attendees. Twenty industry professionals participated in the event as judges, reviewing the submissions and discussing the projects with the teams.

The top scoring senior division team from the poster board session, Team Newton with its Beat Speech app, will advance to the global semi-final round. One Massachusetts junior team, CMS Technovation 2023 and its Love Your Mind app, is also advancing to the semi-finals.

The live pitch featured a special panel of guest judges, including:

• • Lynn Bailey, CEO, Index Data
  • Gabrielle Eisenberg, STEAM Team & High School Partnerships Coordinator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Yogesh Gupta, CEO, Progress Software
  • Melissa Phung, Senior Technical Program Manager, Motional

After much discussion and debate, the panel awarded prizes to the best live pitch teams:

Senior Division
Tied for 1^st: Team Newton & ShopChop
2^nd: Purple Puppy

Junior Division
1^st: iu.carat-eternal
2^nd:  CMS Technovation 2023
3^rd: Ventink

Congratulations once again to all the students, mentors, coaches, and parents who participated in this year’s Technovation Girls Challenge. They should all be very proud of the work that that they did!