OHS Technovation Team
Technovation is an international hackathon for girls, aiming to provide underrepresented groups with a greater understanding of technology. Hackathons involve coding to develop innovative projects that solve a specific issue. This October, OHS’s Technovation team represented the top five junior division finalists from the two thousand submissions at the Technovation World Summit. Congratulations to Aanya Gupta (‘27), Clare Augustyn (‘27), Mona Obedoza (‘26), and Sophie Wang (‘26) for their hard work! As Mona explains, “Hackathons instill the idea that coding can be used to change the world in a positive way.”
The team initially met through the Girls Can Code club, which helps facilitate teams for the Technovation competition. The Girls Can Code club first sent out a Google Form in January, and matched students into teams based on age division and time zone. Then, they worked throughout the spring semester on Technovation projects, hosting meetings and workshops to help teams. Ultimately, they formed the TEDDY Team—a team whose product idea was a text-based early distress detector for the youth. This project tackles mental health by identifying signs of depression or suicidal thoughts in students. Using students’ writing, their model helps counselors identify and address mental health concerns. Mona emphasizes the practical advantages of their project, pointing out that, “A lot of us have friends in the community who are struggling with mental health issues, and when these friends open up to us about these kinds of issues, we know we’re not really qualified to help out. Whenever someone suffers from a mental health concern, the best thing to do is to connect them with a counselor, but it’s always hard to be the one to do that yourself. That’s why we thought of creating a project that helps people who are suffering from mental health concerns be recognized by counselors and provides the appropriate support. Also, we can promote the idea that mental health is something that’s worth being treated.”
In January, the Teddy Team gathered issues, such as mental health, food waste, and airport security to decide which issue to focus on. With the prevalence of mental health concerns, they concluded that a project involving mental health resonated the most with the members. Since they all live remotely, the team coordinated weekly meetings in addition to working individually. Mona excitedly recounts her role on the team, where “I [Mona] was able to work on the prototype—we started by researching on how to do sentiment analysis with the help of our Technovation mentors, and employed the model on an app where people can try out our prototype!” The team’s Technovation mentors, who are professionals from around the world who work in tech and business fields, helped coach them in artificial intelligence, advising them on things like which model to use. This proved to be helpful, for instance, in sentiment analysis, consolidating datasets, and researching online. In addition to their mentors, members of the OHS community played significant roles in their success. To validate the accuracy of their model, the team used sample essays from OHS students collected through a Google Form. Feeding data to their model was really important to generate results, however, one of the major concerns in this process was data privacy—Mona describes, “There were some logistical hindrances about these student essays. There’s lots of concern about whether we’re keeping the data, so we decided to specify that we’re not actually keeping it; the data is secured and private.” Then, counselors anonymously helped validate the results of the model on these essays.
By July, the team cheerfully secured their positions as finalists. This meant that Technovation provided an all-expenses-paid trip to the World Summit, located in California. The OHS Tech Team, who are the sponsors of the Girls Can Code Club, listened to their pitch and gave feedback to help prepare them for the Q&A at the Technovation World Summit. On October 3rd, members of the team flew into San Francisco, California. Throughout October 4th, the team practiced their pitch and got advice. Their pitch focuses on a mix of both technical aspects of the prototype, problem-solving (the positive impact it has on the community), and business—how the product will be sustained monetarily. Then, on October 5th, their “pitch day” was held with Synposys, a software company, in Santa Clara. Later, on October 6th, Mona laughingly recalls, “We had a lot of fun. They took us to the aviation museum, they took us to have a tour of Electronic Arts, and they really treated us well at Technovation. We even got to go to Electronic Arts, and see the video games they created in a museum. We even got to play some video games when we were there; they put on a Star Wars game and we were all failing miserably. But we kept on laughing until we finally made it!” By October 7th, the team visited San Francisco, where they were able to do sightseeing. After a long week, the team prepared to return home on October 8th and 9th.
Overall, one of the most rewarding experiences for the team was being able to meet people from around the world who were also interested in tech. Mona insightfully describes, “We met this team from Ireland, and we were able to talk with them a lot in particular and hear about their perspective. It was really interesting to gain a global perspective on what kinds of problems are relevant to people in other countries.” Not only did the team learn a lot of tech skills from the competition, but for Mona, it was a testament to her capabilities as a programmer as well. She states, "When you go to programming class, it's really great for teaching you a lot of useful fundamentals. But it's competitions like this that let you go beyond homework problems, and experience the kinds of things you can do with technology in the real world. We created a whole website prototype, and it was so rewarding to see it fulfilled, step back, and think, wow, we were able to make this ourselves!”
In the future, the team plans to expand their project in a multitude of ways. Currently, it can sort one student essay at a time in a matter of seconds, but they plan to implement features such as bulk upload. Schools could use this to track students’ essays and see how well their mental health is improving over time. Additionally, they’re in the process of creating a TEDDY API that allows developers to cater their program to their personal needs. With the API, schools could upload their own data to train on, so they can customize it based on their students—for instance, their particular language, language pattern, etc.
For next year, Mona explains, “The Girls Can Code club is already setting up all of the forms for everyone who wants to join Technovation, so this is an invitation to everyone in the OHS community who might be interested in joining us. We’ll be sending out the forms later; feel free to sign up!” With regard to the competition itself, Mona wisely advises, “Never give up. We faced a lot of challenges, but we had the determination to keep on pushing through all of these problems. Flexibility towards adapting to that allowed us to make it this far, to make it all the way to California to join this competition and experience all these amazing things. Anything you do, whether it’s tech or something else, that’s the advice I’d give!” Make sure to join the Girls Can Code Pronto chat for updates on Technovation and other competitions that the Girls Can Code Club might be participating in in the future. A big round of applause to OHS’s TEDDY Team, and we wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors!
Link to Girls Can Code Pronto chat: https://app.pronto.io/invites/mDZSHGzs4