Kids and parents listen up! There’s no need to be bored any more, because an app is coming soon, which will make playdates a whole lot easier.
Imagine something like facebook for playdate-making. Wouldn’t that make your already busy schedule so much easier? Well wish no longer because it is about to happen, and it is all thanks to the genius of a 9 year old girl. That’s right, n-i-n-e, there was no typo!
Alexandra Jordan, from Sunnyvale California invented an all called ‘Super Fun Kid Time‘ with the help of her physicist and hacker dad Richard. But he is quick to point out on twitter that every single idea was hers!
She presented this new app at the recent Tech Crunch Disrupt Hackathon event in San Francisco on September 7th and certainly raised a lot of eyebrows for being so young and so smart.
Her one minute presentation impressed so many people who were queuing up to get the app, but they haven’t even built a proper website yet! Luckily, thanks to a family friend, they were able to set up a landing page to field the thousands of interests from people who want to have a super fun kid time!
The best thing about Alexandra’s presentation, is not that she’s just a 9 year old genius, but because she showed up a lot of other seemingly ‘mature’ people there. The first group to present their hack were two Australian guys with their ‘Titstare’ app. The idea is that the app takes a pic of guys as they stare at women’s breasts which will apparently (according to their “scientific calculations”) combat the declining life expectancy of men. Their presentation was full of boob jokes and breast puns, which perhaps is ironic, considering they were trying to combat the so-called status of men?
Along with ‘Titstare’ was another app called ‘Circle Shake’ which involves simulating masturbation…which the creator did so on stage. How embarrassing for them! I mean, if that is what men have to resort to, sex jokes and masturbation simulation, to attract an audience, looks like they haven’t evolved much over the years.
It sparked conversation about sexism in the tech world, and forced the TechCrunch editors to issue an apology:
“…today, the spirit of our event was marred by two misogynistic presentations.
Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry, and we’ve worked hard to counteract it in our coverage and in our own hiring.
Today’s issues resulted from a failure to properly screen our hackathons for inappropriate content ahead of time and establish clear guidelines for these submissions.
Every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward. Any type of sexism or other discriminatory and/or derogatory speech will not be allowed.
We are sorry.”
It took a 9 year old girl to remind the tech crowd why events like this are important for the future generations. Alexandra Jordan’s father was tweeting up a storm and has been since the event.
Thanks to @tcdisrupt #hackdisrupt for such a great opportunity to make a girl very happy and give her the confidence to follow her dreams.
— Richard David Jordan (@richarddjordan) September 8, 2013
This also made us smile:
@DouglasCrets thank you. When the boys at school told her programming wasn’t for girls, well I think this was a good counter-argument.
— Richard David Jordan (@richarddjordan) September 8, 2013
The lesson here is that we need to encourage more young girls to pursue their dreams and encourage them that anything is possible if they are passionate, dedicated and hard working. For this 9 year old girl who is learning to program in HTML and Ruby , she is doing much more than creating an interesting and possibly hugely successful app. She is an aspirational role model, and no doubt we are going to see her at the helm of a huge company in the future, say like Marissa Mayer!
Check out her confident and cute presentation:
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