Shortly after they began, they were asked to participate in the filming of teams working on the process. The director, Lesley Chilcott, is best known for directing The Hour of Code, Waiting for Superman and Inconvenient Truth, to name a few. The documentary honors the efforts of 5,000 high school girls from 60 countries that participated in this year's challenge.
Since then, the team has received $15,000 in backing from a Venture Capitalist in San Francisco and have met with the developer to enable the girls to further learn how develop the app for Google Play and IOS platforms, find internships with a start-up and fly out to NYC to meet a company that has already raised $400k for an app on the market similar to what Benef-Action has envisioned.
Sana will be on CNN Saturday, October 31st and attending the Premier of CODEGIRL at the ArcLight in Hollywood on November 5th.
Link to movie trailer:
Link to Technovation Challenge:
Please see the quote below from Sana about this experience.
"Being in Technovation made me more aware of the gender inequality in the tech field. I believe that exposure about this cause to the masses is key, especially for girls, since the average female computer science graduate had her first coding experience in college; though the average male computer science graduate had his coding experience in elementary school. I want to actively try to inspire other young women to enter careers in tech and narrow the gender gap,and make a difference on my campus. I will make an impact by increasing awareness and access for female students to learn computer science and coding. Leaning on support from my mentor, my teachers, public and private partners, like Technovation, Girls Who Code and Code.org, I will work to educate, to inspire and to equip high school girls locally at Valencia High School in Orange County and nationally through social media outreach, for the future study of engineering and computer science. Learning how to code is an empowering experience and closing the gender gap is the way to solve the problems in future." - Sana Talwar