Meet Palestine's pioneering female coder, who just won in an international gaming competition
Rasha
Hussein is one of the Arab world's women entrepreneurs to
watch. The first time I met her, she was leading a room full of
tech geeks towards the completion of the first Startup Weekend in
Palestine, as one of the co-founders of Bazinga
Ramallah.
She hasn't stopped leading since. Last night, she won "Most
Innovative" in the
Udacity HTML 5 Game Development Contest, for an
augmented-reality mobile game called
Coin Run, which works like Google's Ingress, asking
players to run around their city and unlock specific locations to
gain territory.
After graduating from Birzeit University this year, she's continued
her education online, taking courses on Udacity's massive open
online courseware platform. She's now applied to Fast Forward,
Palestine's first tech startup accelerator, to continue developing
to game, and is now pioneering a new coding meetup in Ramallah,
starting with her female friends who code.
Watch the video below to see what she has to say about building a
culture of coding in Palestine, and ensuring that women get
involved in the tech scene in Palestine.