HackMundo by STEM for Gals

HackMundo is a virtual hackathon promoted by the Brazilian nonprofit STEM para as Minas (STEM for Gals) that introduces girls aged 14-19 to Computer Science through a project-oriented learning journey.

HackMundo addresses the worldwide issue of gender inequality in the technology industry, more specifically, the lack of female and female-identifying technologists in industry and academia. According to UNESCO (2017), only 30% of women worldwide choose to study STEM-related subjects, with only 3% earning ICT degrees. In Latin America, those numbers are equivalent to 20% for industry IT roles (PageGroup, 2021). The reasons behind this unequal scenario involve a complex web of systemic biases, from the lack of family support to abuses in the workplace. 

Through HackMundo, we tackle the shortage of practical opportunities to learn about technology and to connect with female professional mentors in Brazil, essential elements to introduce Brazilian girls to a career in Computer Science and its related fields. According to the Women In Technology research study by the PageGroup (2021), 47% of the Brazilian women surveyed believe that the deficit of female technologists is due to the lack of role models to follow, and 27% of all subjects surveyed (among women, men, technologists and business leads) believe that the main catalyst to reduce gender disparities in the technology industry is education. However, higher education in itself holds a barrier for Brazilian women: roughly 16% of female students major in computer science-related courses in Brazilian universities (FAPESP Research magazine, 2019). 

Besides statistics, this problem affected my own study choices a few years ago. Like many girls in my close community, I didn’t know if I was talented enough in mathematics to pursue a STEM career. Also, there weren’t many hands-on opportunities to put my scientific knowledge into practice in my city. When I participated in the few science olympiads held in my school, I was frequently the only girl or one of the few others in a class full of boys. 

Years later, however, my perspectives were transformed once I connected online with Women in STEM communities. Through my connections with them, I became confident in my decision to work with technology in the future. Now, my mission is to motivate and mentor Brazilian girls to view technology beyond the code – as a transformative tool they can use to solve complex, interdisciplinary problems.

Therefore, HackMundo was born to disrupt this current unequal scenario by encouraging middle and high school girls to learn about programming in practice by tackling relevant problems in their communities through mobile apps. 

HackMundo is a fully virtual and free hackathon that inspires and guides 14 to 19-year-old Brazilian girls to develop a mobile application that addresses an issue related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in their communities. Unlike other hackathons, however, we take the concept of tight competition time and flip it on its head. 

Traditional hackathons challenge participants to develop a technological solution within 24 to 48h. However, this shortage of time implicitly favors more experienced teams, discouraging beginners from enjoying the genuine goals of the competition: teamwork and technical skill advancement. Because HackMundo’s target audiences are middle and high school students with little to no programming experience, our focus is on learning effectiveness instead of time efficiency. 

Our program comprises four thematic weeks, each focused on the main stages of an early product development process, from ideation to technical demo recording. For prototype building, participants are encouraged and supported to use the no-code platform Thunkable. 

During the four weeks, volunteer mentors stimulate the participants to work independently throughout their development process and technical ambassadors answer their programming questions. By the end of the competition, we seek to have formed confident leaders inspired to improve their communities through technology. 

STEM for Gals, the overarching organization behind the hackathon, serves two primary target audiences: girls aged 14-19 seeking hands-on opportunities in STEM fields and adult, female-identifying technologists. Through HackMundo, we benefit all spectrums of our target audiences. 

We offer an extracurricular opportunity that contributes to the girls' career choices and a mentorship opportunity for experienced women technologists to exercise their communication skills and actively encourage more girls to join the technology industry. 

In other words, through our hackathon, we bridge the gap between programming theory and practice as well as between high school and industry experience.

STEM for Gals is entirely run by volunteers, from college students to technology and science professionals. The initiative is also supported by Força Meninas (Go Girls) at the SolveED Challenge. 

Our team is composed of highly motivated and engaged volunteers who share the mission of making STEM opportunities accessible through our initiatives  and digital content. Our team is managed through seven directorships: Human Resources, Multimedia, Marketing, Design, Hackathon, Outreach, and Writing. I’m confident we are the best group to organize and launch HackMundo because we excel at planning and delivering results, setting realistically ambitious goals, and fostering a dynamic team with diverse backgrounds and skill sets. 

Today, I’m a director for the Design and Hackathon teams. I formed the Hackathon’s cross-functional team in mid-2022, with members from HR, Multimedia, Design, Outreach, and Writing. 

I believe I’m a suitable leader for HackMundo because I’ve experienced various positions in the organization (from trainee to director) and participated in HackMundo's pilot version, in 2020, as a competitor. Using my participant experience, I'm delivering an updated competition model that offers new benefits to the teams' learning journeys. 

As mentioned earlier, STEM for Gals held a pilot version of HackMundo in August 2020 to evaluate user feedback. It occurred over a week and was centered on 16-18-year-old girls, who were later paired with mentors to develop an app that tackled one of the UN’s SDGs. The feedback was positive and highly encouraging for the organization. Participants effectively learned the foundations of programming and benefited significantly from connecting with their mentors. And I can assure you that from a personal perspective: I competed in it prior to joining STEM for Gals’ team in early 2021. This experience enabled me to analyze the competition factors I most enjoyed and those I wanted to change for a future edition. For example, I enjoyed how the hackathon was conducted through the gaming platform Discord. 

However, I sought to change two main factors: competition time and awards. Our pilot hackathon happened for a week (as opposed to the four weeks it runs today) and didn’t offer any prizes besides a certificate (whereas nowadays, we achieved a $500 Girl Up grant to buy our personalized merchandise kit and reached partnerships with Fundação Estudar to offer exclusive free access to their paid leadership courses). 

Another competition from which I could gather important lessons for HackMundo 2023 was the Technovation Girls Challenge. In 2021, I united a team to build a gamified app for 6-12-year-olds to develop healthier eating habits and thus avoid the increase of childhood obesity in Brazil. Our idea achieved two global awards among 60 countries. Later I also became an Ambassador and a Judge for the Challenge, learning the inner workings of the competition and how winners were selected. Much of my knowledge from these experiences is now embedded in HackMundo. 

Ultimately, I enjoyed my Technovation journey so much that I’ve partnered with Technovation Girls Brazil to provide us with technical support (connect Student Ambassadors with HackMundo teams) and outreach promotion. After HackMundo is concluded, I’ll also encourage participants to take their app projects to the Technovation Challenge 2023.

Our hackathon innovates in its approach. We promote a national competition centered on girls with little to no experience in programming. The most popular coding competitions in Brazil are the Programming Marathons promoted by the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC) and the Brazilian Informatics Olympiad (open to middle and high school students; most suitable for students with robust programming experience). However, these marathons still have a vast majority of male participants and are primarily focused on students with advanced skills and/or years of competitive experience. HackMundo comes to change the assumption that technology competitions are only meant for boys and computer prodigies. 

Compared to international technology competitions like the NASA Space Apps Challenge – which lasts only two days – and the Technovation Challenge – which lasts 6 to 9 months – we lie in the middle, with four thematic weeks of competition that cover critical topics in project development: Ideation, User Research, Prototyping, Business Plan and Pitch. 

Moreover, as opposed to technology competitions like the Brazilian Computing Society’s university coding contests and the Brazilian Informatics Olympiad, HackMundo aims to reach middle and high school girls with low to no coding background and inspire them to learn programming through project-building, instead of speed-coding questions. 

Overall, HackMundo promotes a unique experience that allows more time for new buckets of information to settle in the participant's memory and for well-planned ideas to be applied to real community challenges.

HackMundo's future goals are aligned with STEM for Gals' goal agenda: 

2023: 

1. Set DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion) and direct impact goals for the next two years;
2. Structure a reward system for our team; 
3. Introduce the STEM Ambassador Program (in-person multipliers of our mission in their communities); 
4. Launch our virtual store; 
5. Recruit teams dedicated to conducting our direct impact initiatives annually (science research mentorship and HackMundo).

2024-2025: 

1. Expand the organization's reach to environments with limited internet access through our ambassadors and connections with schools and universities; 
2. Establish solid and long-lasting partnerships with social enterprises, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and technology companies; 
3. Achieve financial sustainability for new editions of our initiatives;
4. Assess the progress of our DEIA goals.

Our main technology element is Thunkable, a no-code app development platform launched in 2015 by Arun Saigal and WeiHua James Li, a part of the App Inventor team at MIT. I selected this platform as the development environment for HackMundo participants because it allows them to develop fully functional Android and IOS apps with coding blocks and powerful integrations with mobile devices and AI technologies.

However, Thunkable is a relatively new platform in Brazil and is still unavailable in Portuguese. To solve this, we partnered with Technovation Girls Brazil to connect experienced Student Ambassadors with our competitors to answer their questions and offer us two Thunkable workshops to teach our participants and mentors to use the platform and translate its functionalities.

HackMundo 2023 was launched in the first week of January 2023 and today has 135 participants and 59 mentors working on their projects for the competition, which will be fully concluded by mid-February. 

Throughout 2022, STEM for Gals' social media channels experienced a growth of over 500 followers, the highest increase since the beginning of the organization. Considering this growth rate for 2023-2024, we aim to recruit 200 participants and 80 mentors for HackMundo 2024.

Team: To make HackMundo a longstanding initiative, we must have a sustainable team fully dedicated to its launch every year instead of a team that depends on our subteam members' innitiative to be launched. To solve this, we will open a new admissions process exclusively for the Hackathon directorship to build a team focused on organizing and delivering next year’s version. 

Financial stability: We must have a sustainable influx of funds to afford the hackathon’s awards. To achieve this, we will implement our financial strategy, which includes opening our virtual store and donation spots as well as participating in seed funding distributions and project awards.

For HackMundo 2023, we partnered with Girl Up, Technovation Girls Brazil, and the renowned Brazilian NGO Fundação Estudar. Girl Up is our primary financial sponsor and has granted us $500 (the largest grant value at the time) to invest in the confection of our awards after I signed up the project for the Girl Project Grant Awards. 

With Technovation Girls Brazil’s support, we’ve accessed curriculum materials on ideation, Thunkable, and entrepreneurship as well as the technical help of Brazilian Student Ambassadors. In exchange, we will encourage our teams to refine their projects for the 2023 Challenge. 

Finally, Fundação Estudar has offered us exclusive access to their paid Leadership Platform and promotion of our winning apps on their blog. In addition, they also shared their premium Zoom account to help us record our workshops and make them available for participants who couldn't come to them live.

• HackMundo is a direct social impact project promoted by the independent nonprofit STEM for Gals. Therefore, HackMundo's business model aligns with STEM for Gals’ model. Considering the structure of the Social Business Canvas, we have the following aspects about our Market Intermediary business model: 

• Key Resources: STEM for Gals’ social media, alumnae networks from HackMundo (which include mentors and participants), donations from followers, partners, partnerships, grant competitions, and virtual store purchases. 

• Partners + Key Stakeholders: Female-identifying middle and high school students aged 14-19; college students and early science and technology professionals; STEM diversity and inclusion content creators and entrepreneurs; social enterprises and non-profit organizations (Brazilian and international) centered on education, STEM and gender equity; technology companies. 

• Key Activities: 

  • Program Activities: posting extracurricular and professional opportunities in STEM for our target audiences; writing blog posts; planning and carrying out our annual hackathons and science research mentorships; reaching communities with limited access to STEM opportunities in schools and universities through our ambassadors; reaching out for donations and partnerships;

  • Non-program activities: participating in competitions and grant distributions; (later in 2023) operating our virtual store.

• Cost Structure: today's most significant expenditures are manufacturing and transporting HackMundo’s awards. As STEM for Gals expands, however, these costs will shift to the operation of our virtual store and, in the long run, to the compensation of our staff and the distribution of selective scholarships to Brazilian female-identifying STEM students. 

• Types of Intervention: Hackathon (HackMundo), Science Research Mentorship, Social Media Content on STEM opportunities. 

• Channels: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, stemparaminas.com, Medium Blog, Partners, Scientific Publications.

• Surplus: in the short term, we plan to invest our profits into next year’s prizes for our hackathon, materials for our science mentorship, and premium versions of digital tools our team frequently uses, such as Zoom and Slack. In the long term, our profits will be directed to the compensation of our staff and the distribution of selective scholarships to Brazilian female-identifying STEM students. 

• Revenue: nowadays, our primary source of revenue is Girl Up's $500 grant (exclusively invested in HackMundo 2023). Later this year, however, with the launch of our virtual store and donation channels, our main revenue sources will be purchases, partnerships, and donations.

• Segments:

  • Beneficiaries: Female-identifying high and middle school students aged 14-19; college students; science and technology professionals.

  • Customers: STEM diversity and inclusion content creators and entrepreneurs; large social enterprises and non-profit organizations (Brazilian and international) centered on education, STEM, and gender equity; technology companies. 

• Value Proposition: 

  • User Value Proposition: democratizing access to STEM careers through the diffusion and development of educational opportunities.

  • Impact Measures: number of students reached through our social media and our direct impact initiatives; retention rate in our direct impact initiatives (e.g., how many students signed up vs. how many students effectively completed their projects); feedback forms from our direct impact initiatives (HackMundo and Science Research mentorship); testimonials; surveys from our target audience both from their early connection to the organization to their later professional lives (to evaluate the impact of our initiatives in their careers in the long-term).

  • Customer Value Proposition: connect our partners and sponsors to a community of highly motivated girls from late middle school to early professional life with great potential to become confident entrepreneurs, technologists, scientists, and changemakers through their support and potentially join their teams.

Currently, our model for financial stability lies within grants from award competitions. However, in 2 months, we plan to implement crowdfunded donation links and a virtual store to open revenue influx channels. Besides that, we’ll continue to participate in competitions to obtain seed funding as well as expand our Outreach team to achieve increasingly generous partner donations. 

With these initiatives, we’ll be able to keep investing in our annual prizes for HackMundo as well as our team operations and virtual store. In the long term, through a combination of our store revenue, donations and partnerships, we plan to be able to compensate our staff and distribute scholarships to Brazilian female-identifying STEM students.