Women’s Day, Girls learn App Development at Startup Village

TechnoparkToday.com>> Mar 8: For these girls, mobile apps were all just tools to chat and share photos till Saturday. But after attending the SV Portathon, a women’s day special initiative organized by Startup Village in collaboration with Indian Women Network of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the girls have decided to take up mobile app development as a career.

Around 40 students from several arts and engineering colleges in the state participated in the workshop, which was designed to provide exposure to the students on mobile app porting. Porting an application refers to tweaking an existing mobile app to allow the application to run on another mobile platform.
“It is really inspiring to see the way students are coming forward to grab this opportunity to get a first-hand knowledge about the technology irrespective of their educational background,” said IWN Kerala Convenor (Learning and Development) Ms Shereenn Navas, who is Director of Eastern Group, who spoke on the occasion.

“I think it is a unique opportunity to learn the basics of mobile app development and the fact that it is meant exclusively for women makes the programme even more interesting,” said Monija Mohan, a first year engineering student from Cusat.

Students from Model Engineering College, Thrikkakara, Sree Narayana Gurukulam College of Engineering, Kolenchery, Rajagiri School of Engineering & Technology, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Toc H Institute of Science and Technology and Jyothi Engineering College Thrissur participated in the workshop.

Initially, the students were given basic introduction to mobile and internet technology before splitting up into a groups of five or six. Each group was given training on transforming an Android mobile app into a Blackberry mobile app. The app developers were members of the Blackberry Developer group at the Village. At the end of the program, a Wikipedia page was created by the women participants giving a detailed description of the ported apps.