This time, the team gathered in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, donating time to a group of adolescent girls from the non-profit organization, Tech Girlz, to teach them how to create an app and embrace technology for a future career.
Tech Girlz is a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring adolescent girls to participate in science and technology careers. Males still dominate females in these fields. Tech Girlz provides workshops, events, peers, mentors and role models. Their goal is to spark innovation, exhilaration, and motivation in young women to become tomorrow’s tech leaders.
The objective of the day was to illustrate that it is ok to embrace your inner nerd and do what you love just as our CEO, Ameet Shah, did when he decided to program and build a performance tracking software for his passion, CrossFit.
Many of the girls did not have a clue what Wodify or CrossFit was so we gave them a brief overview and started by having them complete a one minute AMRAP of burpees. We then demonstrated how Wodify worked by entering each of the girls into the coachboard and logging their results.
This got our girls energized and enthusiastic to learn more about how to build an app. When deciding what young adolescent girls would be interested in building an app around, we definitely struggled.
What we came up with was building a “Star Gazer” application. The Star Gazer application located celebrity homes using a spreadsheet of celebrity names and addresses, a cloud platform, wireframes and Google Maps.
After a few hours, the participants completed the app and tested it on smartphones searching for celebrity homes including some of their favorite celebrities: Justin Bieber, Taylor Lautner, Selena Gomez, and Channing Tatum.
The day at Tech Girlz is part of Wodify’s philanthropy program, which includes participating in at least one company-wide charitable event per quarter, helping nonprofit organizations with free IT consulting services, donating one percent of Wodify’s profits to a philanthropic cause, and giving employees one paid day off per quarter to partake in individual charitable projects.
