Hub21 for girls

For the past twenty years, hundreds of thousands of Turkish girls have abandoned their dream of pursuing tech careers or starting their own businesses, because of the lack of support for women and social pressure. 

Our project aims to find the window in a young girl’s journey when just the right amount of entrepreneurial learning and STEAM courses could snap the downward spiral and produce a girl with strong self-confidence for her to continue in the fields of engineering, technology and entrepreneurship .

We believe in that if women / girls have a same role with man / boys in tech, we can solve the world’s problems as reducing air pollution, global warming, accessing clean water and soon.

Today the ratio of women computer scientists is decreasing and we believe that the important reason for this problem is that girls give up being a computer scientist or learning programming languages between the ages of 13 and 17. They start to be affected by the stereotypes and their passions get damaged. Because of this reason, our project focuses on girls aged between 10 - 12 to change their mindset.

Furthermore, girl students improve their entrepreneurial skills and they gain confidence to start their own business in the future. They may not willing to own a business but entrepreneurial skills is still important to pick up life skills that can be useful in their lives. They can learn taking responsibilities to make a change. 

When looking at the statistics about entrepreneurship, female founders are 16.7% of startups in Turkey in 2018 and female founded startups received 27% of total investments in Turkey in 2018. We are working to change this ratio as well by introducing them right role models and encouraging them to be an entrepreneur. 

Hub21 cultivates tomorrow's young entrepreneurs by creating a joyful environment for our budding changemakers to hone their STEAM and entrepreneurial skills. We offer different programs for children as coding, robotics, design, 3D design and printing, game development, programming, virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. All our programs combine entrepreneurial learning and STEM challenges.

Currently we offer our program with free online live trainings to thirty girl students from Darüşşafaka Schools. Darüşşafaka, Turkey’s first non-governmental educational organization changes lives by providing quality education to underprivileged students whose mothers and/or fathers are deceased. Very basic difference which distinguishes Darüşşafaka from other schools is that it adopts the mission of “equal opportunity in education” from the first day of its inception

During our program, we meet with our students every weekend in a coworking space for twelve weeks. This program takes place in a collaborative and creative environment blended with science and technology. Our budding changemakers explore the boundless world of mechanical creation with TWIN Science kits. They learn to collaborate with their peers, solve problems and enhance their knowhow. We always keep challenging our changemakers because we believe that it is important to make our lessons more exciting to teach them.

We completed our pilot program with 30 women students who are 10 to 12 years old from Darüşşafaka Schools. Darüşşafaka, Turkey’s first non-governmental educational organization changes lives by providing quality education to underprivileged students whose mothers and/or fathers are deceased. 

We combine entrepreneurship and STEAM subjects in our program for them to widen their horizon, increase their self esteem and show them women role models in the tech and entrepreneurship area. Our program includes hands-on projects, challenges, creative workshops and inspirational topics according to the age level of children.

In these workshops, they have a chance to learn new STEAM subjects from Hub21`s tech-savvy female tutors, meet new role models from entrepreneurship ecosystem and learn new success stories and get inspired by female entrepreneurs around them.  

We aim to increase the number of girls who can benefit from the Hub21`s programs via digital solutions. We started to execute our programs digitally with live sessions but it is not easy for all girls to have computers and powerful internet access to be able to join our workshops. With the help of sponsorships and grants, we want to increase the number of girls who can attend to our workshops.

Compared to their male counterparts, girls and young women think that they are not capable enough to be an entrepreneur, a computer scientist or an engineer. Society drives them to think like that by not encouraging them to be computer scientists and giving boys more chances to be part of STEAM and entrepreneurship training. In Hub21 for Girls project, we desire to encourage our young women students to be an entrepreneur or an engineer by giving them equal chance with male counterparts, introducing them STEAM concepts and showing them right role models with psychical and live online classes. 

We are combining entrepreneurship and STEAM in our programs for 8-12 years old girls. In Turkey, we do not have any competitor who is teaching these skills to girls between 8-12 years old. We also want to scale our reach by using our online live training service. It has been 3 months we have been using this service with our paid 50 students, it is working quite well. We aim to provide hardware and stable internet connection to our girls to be able to reach out more than 200 students in year all around Turkey. We think that online live training service will increase our reach and create really big difference. 

In Hub21 for Girls project, we are teaching technology to our students like basics of programming with scratch, basics of robotics with Twin Science kits and mBot robots, advanced programming with python, unity and java and we are planning to teach using and coding drone with DJI Tello Edu. 

As for the infrastructure, we are using our own Zoom accounts to connect with our students.

Currently we offer our physical program to thirty girl students from Darüşşafaka Schools. Darüşşafaka, Turkey’s first non-governmental educational organization changes lives by providing quality education to underprivileged students whose mothers and/or fathers are deceased. 

Our program will serve 240 students in a year and we are planning to serve more than 3.000 children in next five years via our online program. 

We aim to serve 240 students in a year and we are planning to serve more than 3.000 children in next five years via our online program. We want to create a robotics team with girls that can be part of global competitions to show them and their peers that girls can also be successful in that areas.  The number may seem small, but the life of many girls who take them as examples will be also changed indirectly.

Our students are lack of stable internet access or computers in their homes, this is both financial and technical barrier that may limit our impact.

We aim to work with corporate brands to get sponsorship to be able to provide hardware and internet connection to our students. If we can find right methodology to distribute these hardware and internet access, we want to reuse these for different region in different terms to increase the number of children that we reach. 

2 full time staff, 4 part-time staff and 10 tutors

Didem Cikse, Co - Founder

Didem most recently worked for venture capital in Turkey, investing in early-stage technology startups. Before there, she was the manager of Arikovani Turkcell, the leading crowdfunding platform of Turkey. Didem was a co-founder of YGA Ventures and as a marketer, she helped grow three tech startups in solar energy, smart home technologies, and location-based technologies. She also contributed to the creation and execution of YGA educational program for children.

Sylvain Roussarie, Co - Founder

Sylvain is a French mentor who has been working with children in New York and Istanbul for the past 7 years. He is also cooperating closely with Professor O. Houdé, Director of the Laboratory for the Psychology of Child Development and Education at CNRS- Paris Descartes. Sylvain participates in cognitive neuroscience and education sciences conferences in Turkey and Europe. 

We have two partners for Hub21 for Girls. 

Vehbi Koç Foundation, which is one of the first charitable foundations of the Turkish Republic, was established on 17th January 1969 by Vehbi Koç with the aim to revitalize the custom of foundation dating far back, yet sunk into oblivion in Turkey. They are our strategic partner and they fund our project for this year.

Our other partner is Darussafaka Schools. Darussafaka Schools believe in our project and they can see the differences in students' perspectives.

Our business model can be thought as organizational support. As Hub21 team, we are selling our training programs to paid customers and in Hub21 for Girls projects, we are applying the similar programs to girls for free. 

We want to be a part of the Solve community and learn from their experiences as much as we want to take advice from Solve and MIT mentors about our projects. If we have a chance to introduce them to our students, that would be great opportunity for them. In addition to that, if we would be able to have funding, we can reach out more students by providing them hardware and internet connection easily. 

We are offering STEAM and entrepreneurship training programs for 8-12 years old children all around Turkey. If we can get the Innovation for Women Prize, we will use it to provide computers or tablets and internet connections to our students. If we can do that, we would be able to raise the number of students that we can reach out and encourage. 

We are offering STEAM and entrepreneurship training programs for 8-12 years old children all around Turkey. If we can get the GM Prize on Learning for Girls and Women, we will use it to provide computers or tablets and internet connections to our students. If we can do that, we would be able to raise the number of students that we can reach out and encourage. 

In addition to that, we are creating our own digital product to use in our trainings. If we get the opportunity to discuss about our solution with engineers at GM headquarters, it would be great chance for our project development process.