Coding, AI and Pie: Technovation Girls Workshop at MIT

Apr 1, 2026 selim's Blog

March 14, 2026 — This year we celebrated the Pi Day (3/14) by hosting 20 middle- and high-school students from the greater Boston area participating in the Technovation Challenge 2026. This in-person workshop at the Institute is one of our most anticipated events of the year.

This year, a majority of our participants were middle schoolers, so we started gently and gradually increased the difficulty adapting to students' progress with the materials.

We started with a beginner’s all-time favorite tutorial, “Password Purr”, in which the students built a password-protected app with a cute image of a cat that meows when you click it. In this tutorial, students learned the basics of App Inventor’s drag-and-drop design environment and block-based coding.

Next, we coded an “Emergency App,” inspired by Dharavi girls in Mumbai, India, who created several apps in 2014 for their community (including a safety app similar to ours) and won the Google Rise award that year.

Our emergency app was able to play a loud alarm when needed, used a mobile phone’s GPS to find the user’s exact location and address, and showed the location on a map. It allowed the user to record a message regarding the emergency and take a photo of the situation, both of which they could share with a loved one or the authorities with the press of a button. (Tutorial coming soon - thanks to one of our MIT undergraduate students- at our tutorials page.)

With two apps under their belts and a solid grasp of App Inventor's fundamentals, the group was ready to tackle something more ambitious — bringing artificial intelligence into the mix. We built an AI-powered app called “GenAI Vision AID” inspired by Maura Moore-McCune’s app VIPMOD (Vision Impaired Person’s Moving Object Detector), winner of the 2024 Global AI Hackathon in the Youth Individual category.

This version of the app allowed a visually impaired person to take a picture of the objects in their surroundings and have ChatGPT verbally describe the image in detail using text-to-speech. The workshop participants did brilliantly in coding and testing this app. Our amazing MIT undergraduate assistants (UROPs) provided support as needed.

After an amazing amount of coding for the day and gaining new skills for their upcoming Technovation Challenge, the students impressed our MIT team with their energy for more! Due to their enthusiasm to do more, we added another tutorial, launching the “Gen AI-Powered ToDo List” app. The app allowed users to track tasks and also asked ChatGPT to organize the list logically and provide an explanation of the recommended routine. The app used the TinyDB component for local storage of the to-do list and ChatBot to communicate with ChatGPT.

After the tutorials, our Development Team Lead Evan Patton shared insights about new App Inventor features, such as the ability to save apps you develop now on your AI2 Companion app, as well as upcoming features like the Web Emulator, which will allow users to test their apps right in a browser without needing a mobile device.

Evan, who is also an amazing cook, honored Pi Day (3/14) by baking pies for all of us to enjoy.

Closing out the day, our MIT undergraduate researchers: Jennet Zamanova, Arianna Scott, Jacky Chen, Sarah Hopp, and Jessica Luu formed an impromptu Q&A panel delighting our workshop participants with their insights. Jennet recounted her experiences as a high school Technovation participant in her country, Turkmenistan, discussing the competition and how it helped develop her interest in computer science. Then, each student in the panel discussed their journey to MIT, what it took to get here, and what it is like to be a student at MIT.

In addition to our MIT student helpers, we had great educators, Danielle Bodine, David Petty, Kerri Murphy, and Elaine Griggs, who helped us with the workshop. We would like to thank them for their contributions.

When it was time to say goodbye, our photographer and Development team member, David Kim commemorated the event with a group photograph.

The feedback we received from the participants at the end of the workshop was overwhelmingly positive:

We wish our MIT workshop participants all the best in their upcoming Technovation Challenge and in their future endeavors. We hope to have other opportunities to work with them at MIT. Keep Inventing! We are so proud of you!