Maria Stegner

About the project

Code Buddy is an app concept I helped develop with my hackathon team, at the Women in Tech Demo Days Hackathon (August 2016), organized by Capital One and AngelHack. Our challenge was to help Girls Who Code (the non-profit partner) by proposing a digital solution to help young girls become interested in coding and computers.

Our team was selected as one of three finalists!

You can view a short video recap from the event here.

We got a write-up on Forbes.com!

The Challenge

According to Girls Who Code, 66% of girls ages 6-12 are interested/enrolled in computing programs. That number drops to 32% for girls ages 13-17, and only 4% for college freshmen girls.

Based on this data, we decided to focus our efforts on a product that would appeal to girls around 12-17 years old, right about the time that they tend to lose interest in computing.

Ideation

My team and I put on our empathy cap, and thought about the typical teen girl and what are some of her motivations: friendships, fashion sense, fitting in at school, having cool gadgets, and figuring out who she is. She is a social being who likes playing games on a mobile phone or tablet. Most likely she would not be motivated to learn to code in isolation in front of a laptop/desktop away from friends who are doing fun things. She is busy with school, sports or extracurricular events, and hanging out with friends. Any app we developed would be competing for her attention. 

We decided to create an interactive avatar that would teach girls the basics of computer programming in a game-like interface. Our goal was to make this tool fun, easy and appealing to girls. The onboarding experience would let the user customize her avatar and teach her about basic programming concepts (objects, properties, variables, functions, loops, etc.) along the way.

For example, the user would choose an avatar type (object), customize her skin, hair, and eyes (id property), customize her clothes and accessories (class property), and choose an activity for her avatar (function). 

The app would need some killer animation with the avatar for maximum appeal. The user would be able to control the avatar's actions (walk, dance, jump, lie down, eat, etc.). The lessons could build up over time to prompt the user to string together code for different combinations of actions. We also thought it would be great to hand out rewards such as new accessories and clothes for the avatar whenever the user feeds some code to the app.

Visual inspiration

For our pitch, I quickly grabbed some visual inspiration of teen clipart off the web to show the kind of visual choices that would be offered to the user to customize their avatar. For our own product, we would commission original illustrations of different body types, skin tones, hair and eye colors, outfits and accessories.

We tied for second place!