There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of women and minorities in the tech industry, but I think there’s one thing we can all agree on. This documentary about young women competing to win a Google prize for their apps is pretty damn uplifting.
Six teams of high school students — three from the US, and three from other countries — competed to design and write apps that would help their communities. As the documentary team follows the finalists from their hometowns to the Google campus in Silicon Valley, we get to know the young women and find out what brought them to code.
What’s fun about the movie is that its structure is sort of like classic youth sports documentaries like Hoop Dreams. It captures the way “building a hit app” has become this generation’s equivalent of recording a hit song or getting picked for a top team. One excellent app could utterly transform your life.
And these teens know it, too. Whether you’re rooting for the girls who barely make it to the competition after travel visa nightmares in Nigeria, or maybe snarking a little bit at the polished girls from elite prep school Exeter, you’ll want to find out what happens when all the teams get to Google and show off what they have created.