TechGirlz Entrepreneur Summer Camp: middle school girls demo 5 startups

It was just like any other demo day for say, DreamIt Ventures or GoodCompany Group.

In preparation, the five teams spent a short period of time working furiously alongside mentors to perfect a business idea, develop a revenue model, conduct market research and of course, a Powerpoint to show it off to potential investors.

The one key difference? The entrepreneurs were all girls between the ages of 11 and 15.

The week-long TechGirlz Entrepreneur Summer Camp finished last Friday with a demo day at the University City Science Center. It’s the second summer that the nonprofit TechGirlz has offered the program, which aims to challenge girls to think like entrepreneurs. The 19 participants even followed the DreamIt Ventures presentation-style (including details like target market and revenue plans)  for their final presentations.

While the camp was more business-focused than coding-focused, some of the participants had already set goals to be proficient in programming languages like  C++ and HTML.

Like Sydney Nixon, a bubbly 7th grader who would throw on her fuchsia headphones whenever there was a break during the day and load up CodeAcademy, a site that offers free online coding lessons.

Nixon, who worked on a sports social networking site called GB Athletics, said that it was the TechGirlz camp that got her interested in learning to code. She said she watched Aaron Friedlander, a Cloudmine intern who was volunteering at the camp, build the GB Athletics site and decided, “I want to make an app.”

Or Priya Ahmad, a feisty, pint-sized 8th grader who said that her mom wanted her to learn C++ and Java before she entered high school. Ahmad, who’s on the brink of getting her black belt in karate, seemed unfazed by the challenge. Anyway, she explained, it makes sense — you can build anything with those two coding languages.

The startups that demoed included:

• GB Athletics, a social network for athletes with a focus on scheduling 
• Wuffy Puppy, an app to find water for your dog during long walks
• Where’d It Go?, a drag and drop app to keep track of belongings
• Spot It, an app that alerts you when items you’d like to buy go on sale
• Famil-E, a calendar app for busy families

Read more on Newsworks.

Learn more about last year’s TechGirlz Entrepreneur Summer Camp here.