Luckley Girls win Microsoft Digigirlz Competition

Published by Luckley House School on Thursday 5th of December 2013

Luckley House girls' school in Wokingham scooped the top prize at this year's Microsoft's Digigirlz competition an event which aims to give girls a better understanding of what a career in technology is all about. The group of eight Year 9 girls listened to inspiring talks from Microsoft employees, who gave them lots of valuable career tips. They then set to work on the Digigirlz Challenge; the groups had to think of a concept and create a two-minute advertisement, with video and photo footage, using Movie maker software.

In addition, they had to write a supporting specification for what advertising strategy they would use, listing three methods of advertising, and justify their choices, in terms of cost, reach, target audience (age, location, income), longevity of impact and how long they could sustain the campaign for. The final task was to create sample screen shots to illustrate how their app would look.
The girls, with the help of two Microsoft mentors, created 'See 4 Me, Read 2 Me' an app that could scan a newspaper for partially sighted people and convert it into audio so that they could listen to the news. This would enable them to access the news when out and about. The idea could develop to include various other concepts, such as recipe cards, books etc.

The girls were ecstatic to hear that they had come first out of the 20 schools taking part!

Caroline Bennett, Head of ICT at Luckley House School said:
'To say I was impressed with the team is a true understatement. The girls worked cohesively as a group and split roles quickly and fairly utilising each of their own strengths. The room was buzzing.
Pupil Rachel Davies, age 16 commented:

'I especially enjoyed our trip to Microsoft to compete in Digigirlz because it has really given me some insight in to both the workplace and the jobs that were performed there day to day. My favourite part was seeing the modern architecture inside the offices. We worked well as a team and I think our amazing marketing team won it for us. I hope that the younger years also have the same success we have had. Thank you so much for taking us Mrs Bennett'

Each of the girls received a £50 Amazon token as well as lots of other goodies such as T-shirts, bags, mugs, pens, notebooks etc.