HERstory

Inspiration

Currently, there has been an increasing representation of women in STEM programs. But this increase has not translated into the workforce. Only 28% are women. Coming from a business background, I was mentored by the Tech Manager and made it into STEM. Coming from an engineering background, I lacked confidence, but the community supported me and I made it into STEM. We want to give back what we have learnt during our journeys. We want to support girls to make it into STEM. With this purpose in mind, we created HERstory.

What it does

HERstory is an interactive platform to support girls to fearlessly join the STEM journey. Kids love games, challenges and, last but not least rewards. The platform challenges them to build age-appropriate backyard science projects and the complexity increases as they progress. They are not alone, the platform incorporates the community concept. In each challenge, the girls have three ways to look for support: a) Google search b) Ask at home c) Contact and ask a mentor The platform enables girls to contact their mentors. In the beginning, we and potential volunteers will be the mentors, Then, as the platform grows, we want to build a sustainable cycle in which the mentee becomes the mentor of the future mentee. For every challenge successfully completed, the player will be rewarded with points. When the player completes the final challenge, a laptop will be provided to an underprivileged girl, and then, she will begin HERstory.

How I built it

The application caters to a wide variety of age groups so first, we maintained a database of the age, challenges and the interests of the kids, then we used a machine language algorithm to identify the challenge that best fits the new player. The number of times a player asks for help also modifies the level for future challenges. The second is connecting this repository to the application that was built on ‘Apphive’. The linked database to the app captures the details of the player and assigns the appropriate challenge and notes the progress. The platform is an android based app so it can easily access the mobile gallery to upload videos and photos for the challenges.

Challenges, accomplishments and what we learnt

We are Masters of Business Analytics students who do not have a background in coding and we successfully built our first mobile app, the challenge was to connect the database and update it with the new entries. At the when we look back to our journey, we can say that all its aspects were challenging and rewarding to us.