Teen’s unity dream filter captures coding contest
VENICEBEACH, Calif. – When Zoe Lynch got to design her own Snapchat filter, she manipulated the image of a brain into a peace sign, telling Snapchat and Google her dreams of having the 7.4 billion people on this earth more unified.
“That’s a lot of brain power,” she said.
The South Orange, N. J., teen winner of a coding contest put on by the two tech companies said she was new to coding when she ran across the contest in her Snapchat but learned to use the Blockly coding tools to build the geofilter, which features the image of a young black woman under the title “Unstoppable.”
Since 2014, Google has been reaching out to young women for its Made with Code initiative, to make the tech industry less male dominated and get future generations of women interested in coding.
This year, Google decided to reach teens where they live— on the Snapchat app. For the 2017 Made with Code # MyFutureMe Challenge, Google and Snapchat asked teen girls to create an augmented reality animat-
ed filter that could be superimposed. Lynch won the contest.
It’s a different sort of move by Snapchat’s parent, which stands in contrast to its other tech company competitors by refusing to release the gender and racial breakdown of its workforce — data that companies such as Google and Facebook nowsay are key to setting goals to make their workforce look more like their diverse customers. Snapchat is popular with black teens, for instance.
An Associated Press poll found nearly nine in 10 black teenagers use Snapchat, compared with just more than seven in 10 whites.
While Snap has said that having “a team of diverse backgrounds and voices” is its best shot at creating innovative products, that process appears hamstrung. A string of female execs has left, according to the Information, and Snap has only one woman on its board.
And users have blasted the company for racism after it issued filters — the overlays to photos and videos — that allowed users to don a virtual “black face” or “yellow face.”
Snapchat, which has nearly 175 million daily users, said it wanted to join with Google to help teen girls see that many of the features they use are made with code, said Jarvis Sam, head of global diversity initiatives for Snap, Inc.
The contest attracted more than 22,000 applicants, whowere asked to create an image with Blockly, a code program developed at Google.
The five finalistswere flowntoNew Orleans to attend a TEDWomen conference and a workshop with the Snap, Inc. Lens Design team.
Lynch hopes to be an engineer when she gets older, “because engineers do cool things and impact the world in a good way.”