In 2017 GoAnimate became involved with the Technovation Challenge. The Technovation Challenge is an incredible world-wide program for girls to learn from entrepreneurs, mentors, and educators.
What is the Technovation mission?
The mission of Technovation is to encourage girls to develop the necessary skills to become technology entrepreneurs and leaders. The girls also have a chance to win a $15,000 grand prize. Teams are challenged to create apps that improve the quality of life in their communities and present a business plan to launch their app. According to edsource.org,
“Technovation also provides a 100-hour coding curriculum. Working in teams of five, the girls are tasked with creating an app that addresses one of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals, such as education, equality, health or environment.”
Technovation is sponsored by a Los Angeles nonprofit and backed by the United Nations, Peace Corp, and several tech companies.
How did GoAnimate get involved?
GoAnimate got involved with Technovation at the request of Cyberport, an event organisation committee, that felt our tool could be helpful in assisting the girls make their pitch videos.
Led by our colleague, Billy Chung, the GoAnimate team strongly supported the initiative of exposing young girls to coding and app development at an early age and how doing so can positively benefit society
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The GoAnimate sponsorship included offering a workshop that educated the girls on how to effectively do storytelling in video and offered free GoPublish logins for all of the Hong Kong regional entries, if they so chose to use it. Like the one below:
One Team’s GoAnimate Experience
We spoke with one the Junior Division teams, the Quintuples, from India that used GoAnimate as part of their pitch for their app, Evonate. Evonate helps volunteers connect to organizers and NGOS and enable them to raise money and organize volunteer events to improve their local community. We spoke with the Quintuples mentor, Siddhant Jain, and the Quintuples team about how GoAnimate played a part in their submission to Technovation.
Meeting the creators of Evonate, the Quintuples:
GA: What goals and objectives were you trying to accomplish?
Jain: As a part of their submission for Technovation, the team had to create a video. They wanted the video to be a mixture of some animation and some live action clips. In addition they also wanted to do voice-overs for their live action videos, add background music etc. While there were multiple options for doing each of these tasks individually, we were finding it hard to find a tool which had all of these features and an easy learning curve, so that we could quickly make the video.
Quintuples: We wanted to make a video that was easy to create and also entertaining for the audience. Also, we aimed at explaining our idea to the general public through a video, which GoAnimate made a incredibly easy and convenient for us.
GA: Who was the audience for this project?
Quintuples: As of now the stakeholders in the Technovation Challenge, but eventually, anyone who is interested in the problem we are trying to solve.
GA: How did you hear about GoAnimate?
Quintuples: We were going through some old pitch videos for the contest and found out about GoAnimate through one of the videos that also used it. We loved the way the idea was presented in that video and wanted to adopt a similar style for our video as well.
GoAnimate videos were very catchy. In addition, when we started using it to create our video, we found it to be very easy to use, which made it certain for us that we wanted to create the entire video on GoAnimate.
How has the video been received?
Quintuples: We found a large number of people watching the video we created and they’ve been encouraging us to further work on our App.
Jain: The video the team created has nearly a 1000 views on YouTube without any significant marketing efforts from their side. The animation in the video ended up being very engaging which probably led to people sharing it with each other.
GA: What were some of the best reactions and experiences you’ve had using GoAnimate specifically?
Quintuples: One thing that we loved about GoAnimate was the fact that we could create our own characters. It was lovely doing that. We liked that we could decide the actions of the characters. For example, talking, running, walking, etc. In this way, it would be very entertaining for the audience and also easy to understand. Some of the other things I liked was the option to add background music to the scenes and also to add our own voices. GoAnimate was very helpful to compile all our video clips into one video, which reduced our burden as well.
Jain: I remember the first time we tried out GoAnimate as a team. I was just showing the team a few things that can be done in the tool. The girls simply took over from there and came back the next day with a near-complete version of the video. Seeing the team proudly showing off their work, nudging me to notice the finer animations they added to the video was the best experience for me.
Results of Technovation Challenge
Since we spoke to interviewed Quintuples they did not make it to the final round of 6 teams chosen from around the world to come to the finals in San Francisco but, we encourage you to learn more about Evonate and check out their video and support the girls.
Congrats to the winners! For more information on Technovation, please take a look at their website.
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