All Girls Hackathon begins with 350 students in city

CHENNAI: TechDiva Foundation, a non-profit that aims to provide equal access and opportunities to women from poor and marginalised backgrounds, is organising the ‘All Girls Hackathon’, a flagship programme, today at Anna Centenary Library. Over 300 students are participating in the hackathon.

Manu Sekar, founder of HashHack Code and co-founder TechDiva Foundation, says, “When we first began rolling out the registration forms, we had decided to have only 100 participants for better coaching. After 350 people registered for the hackathon, we had to close registration abruptly.”

The initiative aims to empower young women – both students who’ve just finished school and also those looking to kick-start their careers. Participants will be given worksheets to test their basic literacy skills.

“Whether they have prior coding skills is not important. As long as they have logic and reasoning skills, they are good to go,” he says. “Candidates with potential will be selected for the UpSkill Coding Boot Camp.”

In the boot camp, developers from all over the world will team up with participants and mentor/coach them to code. Together, they’ll build either an app or a bot. After the boot camp, participants will prepare a presentation and explain their tech.

“After this, we’ll have the Code-Up Challenge, where participants will showcase their product to a panel of foundations, companies, and educational institutions that will support them in higher education,” Manu explains. “It could either be in the form of free education or a monthly scholarship. This is a huge opportunity for young and talented women who are held back because of their financial status.”

The organisation reached out to several government and government-aided schools and colleges for the hackathon. The ratio of registrations from Tamil medium institutions is more than that of English medium institutions. “This edition is seeing a diverse set of applicants as many hail from education in commerce, economics, zoology, Tamil literature, and English literature,” he points out.

For details about the programme, visit https://techdiva.