Youth programming project Creative Code wins at WDC2014 pitching session

The fifth pitching session of WDC2014 Cape Town, South Africa recently saw thirteen projects compete and pitch their ideas. The award went to Creative Code — an initiative that promotes and encourages elements of visual design to inspire young people to learn how to code.

Apart from walking away with R10 000, the well-prepared team of Creative Code got 50% off myViGO’s site building services.

Paperight’s Book Dash project was similarly impressive. The idea is to have an event akin to a hackathon, but with books. The aim is to pair up a group of illustrators, designers and writers for one day so that they can create a children’s book.

Spatial Design is a community-led project revolves around shelter upgrades and infrastructural improvements. Although it didn’t win the pitching competition, it did receive support from Top Copy Communications which will help with copywriting.

There are a lot of green projects sprouting up in and around the Mother City. Waste to Food is one of them. It wants to treat food wastes into high quality organic products. As a result it will avoid negative environmental impacts associated with disposal, create environmentally-beneficial products and enterprise development opportunities.

Other environmentally-oriented projects include Moya We Khaya (MWK) Peace Gardens which is empowering Khayalitcha communities by providing the infrastructure, equipment, training and start-up requirements to create a community garden.

Another eco project, SEED promotes urban agriculture, microenterprise, green economy training, and schools environmental education.

Other projects includes student-led Ex_sample, temperature monitoring initiative Kushushu Design, public placemaking project The Newlands Sporting and Heritage Precinct, See-Saw-Do’s mission to create stimulating educational environments, women empowerment Rock Girl, Project Isizwe’s free public Wi-Fi initiative, and Khaya Power’s solar energy power stations. (See the full list here.)

We at Ventureburn love project pitches. They’re usually the first step to becoming a startup, and ultimately a sustainable business. While there are great prizes to be won, what’s also very important is the networking, mentoring and cooperation between all the projects and attendees which help support and shape each other’s visions.

Most of the projects are also raising funds via the crowdfuning site Thundafund.