All-girl team bags tech award in San Francisco

Bengaluru: Age is no barrier for Nidhi Nair, Aanchal Agarwal, Suchrithaa Rajkumar, Vidhi Kothari and Anushka P Nair. The 14-year-olds won the People's Choice Award across all categories and bagged second place in the middle-school category at t he coveted Technovation Challenge 2016 in San Francisco, USA.
This was not the first feather in their cap.The girls were also in the team that earned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appreciation in the Digital India and Save the Girl Child initiatives.
For the People's Choice Award, the 9th graders of New Horizon Public School (NHPS), Indiranagar, competed with 400 teams from across the globe to devise an Android app they call ChangEd, that stood for Change for Education through Donation. Through this app, NGOs working in the education sector could sign up and have their projects funded through donations. The product enabled users to donate even small change using payment gateways like Paytm.
ChangEd used its inbuilt intelligence to route the donations to NGOs, based on factors like urgency of the demand and amount required.
Suchrithaa Rajkumar said: "It was great exposure for us. It taught me how to deal with unexpected situations." Teammate Vidhi Kothari agreed: "It was great to meet so many worshippers of technology." The team started preparing a model of the app when they were in the 8th grade and submitted their idea in 2016.
They received the award on July 14 at the competition organized by Adobe Foundation, CA Technologies, Google, Verizon, Intel, Oracle, Dropbox, United Nations Women, UNESCO and MIT Media Lab.
"This is not just any achievement. It signifies a triumph of girl power and teamwork... These are the precise values we try to inculcate in students at NHPS," said Sandhya Raman, principal.