On Saturday, May 13th, Malden High School’s Technovation Team went to the Wentworth Institute for a worldwide competition between girls in technology called the Technovation Challenge. The girls have been developing their app, “Treedom”, for months.
At the competition, the Technovation Club entered with Treedom. Junior, and member of the club, Vanessa Vu spoke about the app and explained that “Treedom targets a middle school audience, and encourages them to develop eco-friendly habits with games, recipes, and crafts”.
The decided to do this app because for this year’s Technovation Challenge every group from each different school was required to create an app that helps the world in some way. They decided that the way that they would choose to help the world was to start by targeting the environment.
Paul Marques is the advisor for MHS’s Technovation Team, and Vu mentioned that he worked well with them, she explained that “he gave [them] advice throughout the process and made sure that [they] were always on track”.
The idea for the Treedom app was actually the first idea that was brought up by one of the group members. All of the group agreed that it was a good idea, and they all decided to roll with it, showing that it was not difficult for the group to start up their project.
Vu mentioned that the main challenge that came across while creating the app was the time commitment. She said that “there [was] a lot of time and effort that [needed] to go into the process and it was difficult to manage, especially with all of [her] other priorities”.
When asked how she thought how the group worked with each other she said that she thought that she and her “group mates all worked well together and made [their] contributions in some way, whether it was a contribution in coding or in working on the business plan”.
The Technovation members divided up their responsibilities by splitting their team up into two different subgroups. Vu explained that “there were some who focused on coding the app itself and others, including [herself], who worked on the business plan of the app”.
When asked how Vu thought how the app turned out she said that she “was satisfied with the completed app considering [their] limited time”, but she did add that she felt like there was still some room for improvement on it.
Vu spoke about the competition saying that it was a “great learning experience”. She said that “[their] group pitched [their] app to many people and got great feedback”.
Vu added that she also learned a lot at the competition explaining that it “taught [her] what work is really like in the real world, and it also taught [her] how to write a business plan”.
Although the club didn’t win the competition, it is clear that a lot of hard work was put into the app, and that the competition was a positive experience for them.
