Step No. 1: Don’t be afraid of the unknown
When Technovation Girls founder Tara Chklovski was little, her father, a former Indian Air Force pilot and innovator, told her to ask questions when she was unsure or afraid of something, because those feelings are just place markers for a lack of understanding. Learning new things gives you strength, he explained.
Chklovski followed his advice and soon trained to be a physicist and an aerospace engineer. In the process, she became determined to help the worlds’ millions of schoolgirls know, like she did, that they’re capable of anything. So in 2006, she founded Iridescent, a global tech education nonprofit that was funded by the National Science Foundation and was a signature program of the US Navy. Experimenting with 14 different programs, Chklovski and her team were seeking the best way to achieve a long-term STEM impact for students, families and communities. Technovation — a program with 13- to 18-year-old female students imagining and creating problem-solving apps for their communities — was the one with the wow.
“This is the magic formula — this combination of finding a problem in your community, working in a team, connecting with a mentor and having a sufficient dosage, so roughly 12 weeks, then testing your idea with users and then pitching it in front of a large community in a high-energy, kind of exciting competition way,” she says. Iridescent scrapped the other 13 programs, renamed itself Technovation Girls in 2010, went global in 2013 and was the subject of the “CodeGirls” documentary in 2015.
In the early days, Chklovski says, potential funders often had “a negative reaction — ‘Poor people don’t need to learn about this.’ I was like, ‘Let’s just see what happens if you deploy this program.’ ”
Now, more than 400,000 girls worldwide have been involved in the nonprofit’s clubs in schools and community centers, building their confidence, knowledge and skills; lifting communities; and even instilling a can-do power in their families.
“Parents are the most defining factor for success for a child,” Chklovski says. Adults tend to hold children back from bigger issues, from pursuit of complete solutions, “because they are afraid. Young people see so much is possible. Education is the only cure to fear. Learn, get your hands dirty … know your own strengths, self-awareness, what drives you.” Technovation Girls clubs urge parents to come each week so they also can learn about technology possibilities.
(Interview clip: Chklovski explains the importance of parents.)
Chklovski recalls a Detroit participant’s family. The mom, dad and younger brother came every week. “In the first sessions, the family dynamics were that the kids deferred to their dad for problem-solving. As time went on, the mom started to speak up a bit more,” she says. At the end of the 12 weeks, the dad and son both remarked that they were pleasantly surprised to learn how much the mom had learned and how she was more willing to assert herself.
“That is absolutely the kind of change this program is striving to make. It’s not just about ‘Let’s get these kids excited about STEM.’ It’s more about some of these deeper social norms that are being tested. … It’s an unforgettable experience,” she says.
(Interview clip: Chklovski shares how Technovation Girls transformed a Detroit family.)
Jessica Schmilovich, a 2024 Technovation Girls alum and international semifinalist, was aware of coding and enjoyed problem-solving before she joined the club, but her parents weren’t very familiar with STEM. They quickly became “much more informed and excited about STEM,” she says.
Step No. 2: Consider yourself a builder — not just a user or a piece of a puzzle
Technovation Girls team members are taught to avoid being pigeon-holed into simple tasks like learning how tech works or building a small piece of a larger project. Instead, they are inventing and building entire complicated, solutions-oriented STEM projects from start to finish.
“This is the only program running across 120 countries that has longitudinal data showing that when girls go through Technovation, it completely transforms their career trajectories, their higher education choices. They’re like, ‘This is a space that I can see myself in. I can be a problem-solver. I can be a change-maker,’ “ Chklovski says.
“These girls wanted to make a difference, asked their community how they could best serve and used their skills to make it happen.”
— Ian McIntyre, teacher
The students are tasked with accomplishing this in weeks, not years, because Technovation itself likes to move fast and keep an eye on the future.
“We were one of the first organizations to run a mobile app development program two years after the first iPhone came out,” she says. AI became part of the girls’ projects in 2016. Today, Technovation strongly encourages them to use generative AI in every step, from ideation to code development and beyond.
(Interview clip: Chklovski shares why girls pick the topics they do.)
“A big part of it is building your own data set and an AI model that will help you solve a problem,” Chklovski says, pointing to a Vietnamese team’s knowledge that facial recognition doesn’t work well with Vietnamese facial expressions, “so they trained their own data set using different facial expressions from Vietnamese culture.” Another team built a data set for AI that recognizes skin blemishes to give feedback on whether they’re dangerous.
One Technovation Girls team in the US built out a dynamic app called SAY in both Android and Swift that gave students coping with Hurricane Harvey’s destruction in Houston a platform to offer resources and share their stories. The entire group ended up on full scholarships in computer science fields in college.
A team in Indonesia created the PlatePal app to reduce food waste in households. Users can input their food items and expiration dates to get reminders to use them before they expire. It helps them save money on groceries too. A team in Canada designed the Project HeartScope app that uses machine-learning systems to detect cardiomegaly from X-ray scans.
“It requires a lot of courage to say, ‘This doesn’t exist’ and ‘Let’s build and innovate and come up with a completely new way of doing things,’ ” Chklovski says.
Step No. 3: Create an exciting curriculum
Too much of schools’ instruction is focused on the standardized test, and “most AI curricula out there just kind of stops at literacy. With us, it’s how can you apply it to a problem that you care about? That changes a student’s sense of identity,” Chklovski says.
“Before joining a Technovation club, Vanessa Tostado, a 2013 Technovation Girls alum from California, had had a few negative experiences with computer science and doubted her ability to code.
“What initially drew me to Technovation was the entrepreneurship aspect — designing and implementing an idea from scratch. The excitement of building something outweighed my fear of coding. I loved iterating through ideas and considering all aspects of app design. My Technovation mentors helped me overcome my negative biases about coding,” she says, noting that she pursued computer science in college and has been a software engineer for five years.
Technovation’s core curriculum — which is free and translated into about 10 languages — is supplemented with up to 50 hours of additional learning aimed at beginner, junior and senior competitors, as well as other courses focused on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Student teams can use the curriculum without competing or choose to vie in the international competition for best regional and overall projects as well as best projects related to climate, hunger and education access.
Local mentors — more than 14,000 so far — are trained by Technovation to help students with critical thinking, coding, AI and a variety of soft and hard skills as they work through their projects.
(Interview clip: Chklovski explains the many ways the program works with teachers.)
“Helping girls is incredibly fulfilling,” says Cynthia Barnett, Ed.D., a Technovation Girls chapter ambassador as well as CEO and founder of Amazing Girls Science. “There’s a profound satisfaction in witnessing … girls learn to work together, respect diverse opinions and pool their strengths to achieve a common goal. Seeing them transform from learners to creators is deeply rewarding. It’s not just about their accomplishments — I feel a shared sense of achievement and a rekindled passion for teaching.”
“We are the only AI-in-action curriculum out there that has research data backing it that shows that it works,” and Chklovski says the mentors’ support and knowledge is a big part of that.
Texas middle-school computer science teacher Ian McIntyre, a Technovation chapter ambassador, says that “Technovation and Girls Who Code have personally kept me in education and in the classroom,” adding that it’s a great way to build a dynamic computer science program and recruit and retain quality educators.
“In 2014, the number of girls in our technology classes completely dropped off. We needed purposeful recruitment and retention strategies that were meaningful to a wide variety of students. Enter Girls Who Code and Technovation!” he says. “These programs created the framework through which we now operate. Technovation provides useful templates to help drive the product development cycle, and these greatly help to get over the analysis paralysis. They provided a way for students to view themselves as developers, for the space to be inclusive of all voices, and for them to make a legitimate difference in their communities.”
Pennsylvania educator Amy Davis McShane, a Technovation chapter ambassador and the lead for Career Ready PA, says the program “fits perfectly with the career education and work standards that we have in our state. And I especially love that girls can see professionals [who look] like them working in the field. It has also been great to connect with other educators and experts, which has helped me grow in my role and better support our teams.”
Step No. 4: Watch girls thrive as they kick “impossible” to the curb
McIntyre’s first Technovation Girls experience was with eighth-graders who wanted to help the local women’s center. The assistant director of the center’s family assistance Shelter Bucks program was spending 50% of their work time on the program. However, important work was being rushed because the program was consuming too much time.
“The girls automated the process, creating ‘debit cards’ for the clients and a dynamic inventory system for the employees. They held a training for over 30 adults in the shelter on how to use the app,” McIntyre says. “These girls wanted to make a difference, asked their community how they could best serve and used their skills to make it happen.”
He says many of his Technovation students over the years have received large college scholarships and have successful STEM careers — including one who is now an Amazon Future Engineer, a data analyst student at Duke University and a presenter at state and national STEM conferences.
Zenay Taylor-Clemmons, a 2012 Technovation alum of California who is now in New York City, explains how Technovation Girls ignited her love for innovation and technology and “served as an incubator for a dream that eventually materialized into my career.”
“I experienced firsthand the importance of representation for women in a field I never thought was accessible to me. The program broadened my understanding of what was attainable, inspired me to pursue a career in STEM and motivated me to participate in other STEM-related programs and initiatives to explore more educational and professional possibilities,” Taylor Clemons says. “I began my tech career as an intern at local startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually transitioned into Big Tech at a FAANG company [Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google].”
Schmilovich, who was a 2024 international semifinalist, says she “gained a much deeper appreciation for how STEM and AI can directly impact and shape the world. Working on [my app] AuthentiCheck AI helped me see how technology can solve real challenges, like identifying false AI-generated content to promote digital literacy. It shifted my perspective from viewing AI as just an exciting field to understanding its potential to create real and lasting change. Technovation gave me the confidence to bring projects like AuthentiCheck AI to life, allowing me to tackle real-world challenges and turn innovative ideas into impactful solutions.”
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To learn more about chapters and clubs, click on your area on the map in this link. Competition registration for girls (and mentors) closes on March 17, but the nonprofit recommends that girls start by the end of January to have enough time to complete their projects.
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